Recent reviews by DeathTech

Raw sewage of an abandoned game.

Received this game for free from the developers.
This is not kept into account for scoring. If you don't believe that. Read my nuke'em all review.

Unknowing what to expect going into it I downloaded this at current 300mb ish game and was pleasantly surprised.

Certainly. There are not yet many upgrades. And clearly the game is balanced as such so that you can't quite get far enough to exhaust all upgrades but it sure was fun trying.

The mini challenges keep you on your toes trying to strike a balance between surviving this day and getting enough score for a double upgrade next day.

A match does not last very long but is very engaging and fun while it lasts.
But it is GREAT retro fun. If you just want to waste some time having fun.

In terms of gameplay you have three upgrades and a re-roll. If you use the re-roll too often you have 4 upgrade paths and no re-roll.
Pick your upgrades strategically and you will get far.

Visuals: Retro/10 Various visual styles available via display options. A++ for effort. Thank you for including windowed mode devs. <3

Music: 8/10 Basic but nice. Avoids overload. Well spaced and differentiated to avoid feeling constantly same-y.

Gameplay: 6/10 - Don't get me wrong. It's fun. And good. Just short. A w.i.p at the time of writing. I'm excited to see how this evolves. Could be more fun if I can have more upgrades to get further.
(-2) Early Access, incomplete project.

Conclusion:
It's worth the £4.49 ask price for several hours of intense retro fun if you ask me.
I'm sure I will be putting more hours in but for the 3.4 hrs at writing. I've seen all there is to see. I now just need to get better at the game!
My only regret is that I didn't get to give these devs money for such a great product. I hope they finish it. As for now it stands partially finished.
The retro game. I didn't know I needed.

So you want to know about Nuke Them All.
Sit down son. I will tell you everything you need to know why you should ABSOLUTELY NOT buy this definitely still early access title.
And make no mistake the positive ones are probably trolls or paid off. There is nothing worthy of awards to this game.
Let's Begin. But first for those score inclined: 2.5/10 this is graded down from it's original 25/100 and 25 is generous.

My journey begun when I received a free review copy.
Only requirement: Play the game, "We are doing a content and you might win money."
Bad start.

Let's move on.
I streamed the game and behold it launches.


First thing I do is head over to the options to customise my experience, after all I am a pc user.
Graphics are : Windowed or Full Screen...
Sound: Pick between bar 1,2,3,4
Change controls? Absolutely not.
Does it remember to put the game in windowed mode? Absolutely.... As long as you remember to enter settings every time.
Ooofff very bad start. Smells like a ♥♥♥♥ mobile game.

I click on the first map available. FORCED TUTORIAL.... Great... I think to myself.
Oh look. The tutorial tells you to do things. And is the ONLY time you are told the controls. Hope you screenshot them.
Or you can remember at all times what they were from memory.
You play through an interactive tutorial which is an interesting idea however the voice over never repeats herself and no there are no subtitles or visible goals.

The greatest thing about the tutorial is that it's short.


The game is simple. You start with a fortress, destroy the opponent fortress. No matter what you do, they are stronger produce units practically without factories and will start with overwhelming force in most cases. That's right, ♥♥♥♥ balance. Give the enemy overwhelming force right out the gate, high tier units attempting to grab your factories from 1st second of gameplay.
The only way you will win is by taking factories and depriving the opponent of theirs.

The easiest way to do this is simply by obtaining and holding the nuke, then erasing their factories.
It's fun-ish, but random events will constantly hassle you and kill mostly YOUR units as they almost always seem to hit JUST YOUR UNITS and magically avoid enemy troops. Not to say they can't, They just mostly don't.

The game tells you to cap flags as they "increase your production speed." in fact the first thing taught to you in the tutorial.

Unfortunately this is a simple lie, they do ♥♥♥♥ all. Sorry. Their purpose is to set alignment of nearby buildings.
Cap factories, upgrade where possible without disrupting your supply lines and you'll maybe be fine.

If you want a FAR better gameplay of this type of rts where you have no resources to worry about. Go play "State of War" a game released in 2001 and FAR superior to this questionable money grab.

Techtree exists... It's cross map and it's actual use seems incomprehensible as the enemy can upgrade building beyond your tech level and as soon as you take the flag you claim their factories. So... What is the point of this? So you can do the upgrades yourself.

Remember, it only takes one unit, 2 seconds of being near the flag. To capture the factory.
Most factories take 30+ seconds to produce. Rush when they send an army and you won't have any trouble stealing it.


The game crashes at least once per map. Steam achievement? Crash.
Send a unit in a way it doesn't like? Crash.
Changed an option it didn't like? Crash.
Opened map editor? Crash.
Tried to load your edited map before the controls menu pops up? Guaran-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥-teed my dude, crash my man.
Played the game once before ever? Enjoy getting a popup every time asking you if you want to load quick save. Oh hohoho you wanted to load your game? Crash.


The developers couldn't be bothered making a map editor so what you get is an active scenario. You can't drag units that aren't yours. And can't drag units that aren't moveable buildings. You can't delete things unless you drag them into the deletion button.

But if I can't move them.... Then how do I delete them? You don't.
You can move the base structures? Yes. Once. Then they are immovable objects that will never meet an unstoppable force.

There is no scripting. Despite the developer making it looks that way by putting their image of custom maps as a STANDARD map from the main campaign.

There are many hotkeys which spawn varieties of things but devs never bothered writing them down or creating an F1 help menu to help you understand ANYTHING about their editor.

Oh and units shoot at each other WHILE the editor is paused ofcourse...

• 6 maps on the desert world
  
• 3 jungle world
  
• 3 zombieland
  
• 3 volcano world
  
• 3 ice world
  
• 3 space world
  
• 3 wasteland

24 maps and they aren't bad. Some are gimmicks. Like "Nuke Ball" which is also the "proud creation" of the unusable map editor according to their store page.

You know that map editor with no scripting support.
M O V I N G ON

I'ma give the game a break now. And talk about it's cutscene.
These happen outside of the gameplay look thankfully. And atleast are ACTUALLY humorous. However I do not recommend buying a game for just it's funny weird cutscenes.
I've only seen 3 and one of those was the intro when booting the game. Other are desert world and ice world.

The animations in-game and in-videos are very nice.
A lot of love was put into it.

What gui? Designed by DJ Khaled. Clearly.

The music is nice, enjoy listening to the same track for practically all 1 hours you can stomach. Juding by all other reviewers seeeming to have at max about 1 hour give or take.

While the game is playable, at max you'd be playing it for 4 hours, completed all there is to do and throw it in the bin.
The game presents itself nicely with nice graphics and sounds.
But programming was clearly done by a 3 year old using chat gpt.

From the weird arch based pathing instead of A* to the constant crashes. Auto saves mere seconds after reloading from a crash. Bad gui, and generally half the time units refusing to follow simple orders.

This game is let down in every way humanly possible by the blatant lack of testing.
The fact this game was allowed to actually release in order to pretend not to be an "Early Access" title is revolting.
The fact the game credits as me to whishlist on steam is even more revolting. Because it indicates to me this is probably the demo with the word demo removed.

It quotes " Z (1996), as well as modern classics like Company of Heroes, and They Are Billions.." as being games it is like. Go play those games, they are unlike this... Actually worth your money.

M A K E NO M I S T A K E.
This game IS ABSOLUTELY 100% uncooked. You're eating raw tonight.

I hope in the future I can revise this and see the cash grab turn into an actual game worth my time.
As it stands. I spend more than the game's worth of time "playing" it. So you never have to.
If I had my name to this as a programmer i'd ask to have my name removed out of shame.

Arena shooter. Misleading video.
Entertaining for about 30 minutes.

Until you realise of course there is nothing more to this game.
You have an apartment to wander around in with no real content.
And arena shooter. And honestly not a great one at that.

If you enjoy raiding the same 4 planet locales.
If you enjoy random invasions from random places in your ship due to unblockable spores.
If you enjoy waiting a realtime hour on your ship for crops to grow so your clones don't starve.

You might have fun. Otherwise know this game has not been updated in 4 years.
I almost have the patience of a saint and still got so bored I stopped playing after 28 hours.
Repetitive recycled game play is an understatement.
4 worlds in a row looked exactly the same and I don't believe the aliens come in any other variety than the aliens.

Once the novelty of the graphics wears off you will relegate this to your boring trash bin.

Prelude:
Had my eyes on this for quite a while.
Am going to have to walk away quite disappointed as it is extremely rudimentary for what it is.

Honestly I could have made this myself. Heck I'm already half way there.
But let's not digress. On to the details.

The audio Issue:
The software records voice clips as .wav files. And uses them to compare the audio stream by polling it ever few seconds.
To understand how BAD this is. You need to understand that even with cleaning up the audio of these files from static background noise it still has trouble understanding me.
Yet endlessly detected my background static as "Menu" being said.

The reason it does not hear me is it compares small audio clips to the stream. Resulting in RANDOM clips which the dev kindly lets you listen back to.
Saying "Open" was impossible for me as it would attempt detection on either "o" or "pen".
Obviously my audio clip of me saying "Open" does not match with me saying "pen" causing the software to not be confident.

Word Chains:
"You can chain words." However due to the instability of what I just said. It won't be detecting word chains.
I've yet to get it to understand "open map" while "map" would trigger at random times and so does "menu" due to static remotely sounding like it. In fact it seems to hone in on the static as speech despite being barely perceptible in the audio samples.

It does let you use any language as they are clips of you talking which is good.
Setting things up is "easy" which is true but there is absolutely no "advanced" features which could mitigate these issues.

Unless your microphone audio is absolutely studio quality clean I do not see this software in any usable capacity.

Accuracy:
The reason detections of audio are so quick is that the software does not handle audio appropriately.
Every few ms a poll should be taken to attempt to check against the library of audio clips for comparison.
This is slow. But is ACCURATE. Sadly this software does the opposite which is FAST but INACCURATE.

Despite their advertised accuracy. Which is only achievable in a clean audio setup, with a practically no noise room and absolutely no background noise.

HOWEVER

The one use case:
The software does boast a few modes which allow you to play with the detection.
The only useful one seems to be the "Push to talk" mode.

The reason this is the case is as soon as you press it starts to record which lets you avoid the "polling" issue described above.
The accuracy with this PTT mode is VERY good. So if you want a voice recognition software the is extremely accurate and push to talk. This DOES seems to get the job done in that VERY SPECIFIC case.

That being said. Unless your intent IS to have a voice control context button. This software is easily overshadowed by things like voiceattack. However those rely on microsoft voice recognition which honestly should be avoided like the plague.

Conclusion:
Unfortunately I can't say this software is worth more than £1.
I got it on a deal for £9.89 and feel absolutely ripped off as this is extremely CRUDE for what it is advertised.

£44 for standard price... That is scam levels price. This software is absolutely NOT worth that price.
Additionally the price of this software has not come down as far as I can tell so don't bother waiting or hoping.

Also the "Automatic AI Training" which "Trains the AI"?
What A.I.? As far as I can see there is NO data training profile saved anywhere.
This is not an A.I. and if you believe there is. you are incorrect.

It does say "training" when you start capture. But gives NO indication of if you are supposed to talk. Or shut up.
Is it training on your voice? Or capturing a sample of background noise for noise cancelling.

Absolutely nothing is explained beyond help cues and there is no tutorial to indicate how you SHOULD behave during that section.

Make of all this what you will. I hope the DEV will address these concerns from one Dev to Another, this simply... Will not do.

One of the best racing games I've ever played.
Normally I do not like racing games because I am terrible at racing.

This arcade game I picked up for free is one of the few racing games I actually have ever enjoyed.
The boost and slip streaming mechanics make it possible for even the worst racers to keep up with the best.
This makes for Hilarious situations playing with friends via online.

There are several game modes:
Arcade: Regular racing, if you don't go through a checkpoint in time you dnf but it is pretty generous.
Cops and Robbers: Zombie type mode, one player starts at the cop and kills others to convert them to cops. Robbers must pass through a checkpoint in time or will be converted by dnf.
Drive or explode: Stay above set speed limit, limit goes up every lap, try to survive or take out the competition with ramming.
Barrel Barrage: Lap racing with damage, place barrels to damage your enemies or just outlast them in the race.

All gamemodes are quite fun, the A.I. are very "rammy" on single player and multi player but they can be turned off in multi.

I usually HATE racing gaming but this game had me plastered with a huge smile for HOURS.
Even streamed it and people loved it.

Graphics: 10/10 - Arcade style advertised, arcade style achieved. Love the art style.

Gameplay: 8.875/10

- Single Player: 8/10

- Grand Prix: 10/10 Good fun, you get to do 4 maps per cup, 5 cups total. Difficulties are noticeably harder as you go up.

- Time Trial: 6/10 Functional but has issues. Chiefly the "Developer ghosts" are using advanced strategies to get great times. Making it demoralising to figure out how they even achieved such speed to begin with. Once you get the strat, it's trivial to beat them. Still a fun challenge and great way to learn a map. Knowledge does not transfer to multiplayer.

- Multi Player: 9.75/10

- Arcade 9/10 - Good fun. Great racing.

- Cops and Robbers: 10/10 - Don't give your friends the idea to drive in reverse direction as cops. That would be funny. For best experience, set lap count to 7 (Max).

- Drive or Explode: 10/10 - Now this TeACHES you to drive like your LIFE depends on it.

- Barrel Barrage: 10/10 - I would give it 20/10 if I could it is SO MUCH FUN. Great DLC.

Customisation: 9/10

- You can customise your cars a little, with unlocks but best of all they are only cosmetics.

- Cars are unique and fun, pick the one that works best for you and shop around a bit to find a good car.

Punishments:
- Always online DRM, can't launch game if not connected to steam AND in online mode.

Remarks:
- No modding. But the infrastructure seems there. Perhaps if it was more clear how to mod it could be done.

Final Score: 8.29/10 (27.875)
Graphics: 10
Gameplay: 8.875
Customisation: 9
Punishments: 1

A damn good game worthy of your money. I wish I bought it instead of getting it for free. And my friends are intent on buying the sound track JUST to support the game a little. We are sad we did not pay full price for this gem.

TL:DR Decent enough game but fair warning.

Helibourne (Classic)
Some Complaints:
1. There is a tier system for vehicles limited to the maps.
2. You can't use helicopters of a higher tier on a lower map or vise versa.
3. There are 8 maps only.
4. Tier 1 heli's are only playable on a single map. Enjoy grinding to tier 2.
5. Tier 2 heli's can only be used on 2 maps.
6. Tier 3 heli's can only be used on 2 maps. Hope you like afganistan.
7. Tier 4 heli's can ony be used on 3 maps.
8. There are only 2 factions. You're soviet or us.
9. For all repairs / restocks need to fly back to base.
10. Enemy ground troop markers aren't displayed until you can read their tattoos.
11. No in-game voice chat just radio wheel.

The good.
1. Gameplay is fun and smooth
2. Land pickup troops, transport back to base. Good fun.
3. Helicopters feel unique and are fun to fly.
4. Nice graphics.
5. Various roles feel unique even though there aren't many.

Intro
X4 Foundations is more than just a game. It is the game for those who like getting the absolute **** kicked out of you from the start. And fighting your way from bottom feeder to proper space empire legend.

This spacegame has everything you'd want if you enjoy a cross-breed of space shooter, empire sim (Optional), Space station management (Optional) and most importantly, the ability to just conquer entire sectors or do naughty stuff like robbing people.

But let's get into the reviewing part.

Space Combat wise this game has it nailed down.
Although the A.I is incredibly easy to dogfight in a 1v1 battle (Including destroyers v peashooter) the game really gets hard when fighting entire waves on your own.

Empire sim wise the game is well optimised, A.I traders will come to the station or your own ones will be able to pawn overflow if you get the right people in the right places but overall the A.I does a great job keeping supply chain going.
Commanding troops is easy and straight forward once you get used to the controls.

Space Station building wise it has improved a lot since the days of X3 reunion. I mention X3 because I played about three hours of rebirth and got so frustrated I uninstalled that crap so I am going to pretend that never happened and it doesn't exist.

The best way to play X4 is to and I quote "ROLEPLAY THE **** OUT OF IT".

Experimental multiplayer is interesting where you can send fleets to help your friends or attack the **** out of them.
Pretty funny to me. Not so funny if one of them is a cheater and just hacks himself a limiteless armada and keeps attacking you.

Scoring wise:

• Graphics: 10/10
  
• Gameplay: 6.5/10 (26/40)
  -Combat: 7/10 (Dumb AI,Formations are not upheld correctly,ships do not co-ordinate with the convoy you assign them)
  -Station Building: 8/10 (Only complain is that blueprints are expensive and hard to get.)
  -Empire Management: 8/10 (Will give those points back when AI staff have any banter, personality or atleast I can find 1 pilot in the galaxy with enough rating to be useful)
  
• Story: 3/10 (Start is pretty cool but I researched all things and nothing else ever happend so... What story?)
  
• Music/Sound: 10/10 (It's just beautiful and serene, you know when you're in a fight too.)
  
• Controls: 7/10 (Decent set up; sadly some keybinds are just not very straight forward and menu is confusing.)

Total Score: 36.5 / 50 (7.3 / 10)

In conclusion: I love this game. If you like all the above you will probably also overlook it's flaws and play it to death.

THE TUTORIAL:
Now I know most of us probably skip the tutorial but for those who are new to gaming or genuinely enjoy doing a tutorial so you can start the game informed, this is for you.

The tutorial sets you off in a unique tutorial track. It lets you play and as it spawns in things to explain the game to you, it also shows prompts and slows the game down into a type of bullet time slo-mo so you don’t have to worry at all about “the flying parts” while you read.

Overall, the tutorial is very well made but sadly lacks several bits of key information that will be contained within this review.


Antigraviator places those bits of key information before you start the tutorial. When you are prompted with something that looks akin to a hints window. Which of course gets completely ignored as no one assumes a hints window contains anything but hints. Instead, it contains those missing explanations such as the game mode explanations and a list of all the traps.

Which in turn meant I played ages without understanding any of the special game modes at all until I decided to retry the tutorial and then after finishing it a second time found out it was explained in the hint menu…

For shame.

THE CUSTOMISATION:
Your ship in Antigraviator can be customised in two major ways:

Parts that affect ship performance.
Decals and colours that do not affect the game.

SHIP PARTS:
Grav
Wings
Transmission
Plating
Each part has 3 potential parts that can be used to make your Grav a bit more unique.
They do alter the course of the game and cost in-game credits to unlock. These credits are unlocked by winning campaign leagues which you can always redo to get some extra cash.

THE DECALS/COLORS:
The game lets you choose from a few decals (6) and over 40 different colours by their count. By my count, it is 10 as the 30 others are “slightly darker shades” which I do not count as a different colour.

THE TRACKS:
When it comes to tracks in a video game, it really is make-or-break for me personally.

I can not stand tracks that are unfair, unstable, confusing or plain downright unplayable.
And for the most part, I find that Antigraviator does okay with the tracks, however!


Some of the tracks in the game have the following issues:

Several tracks with hills both up and down that easily ruin the race because you can’t see anything.
A track that at one point just simply has a massive gap and another one with the road jumping and going into another direction where you will most likely get insta-killed, without any warning obviously this will ruin the race as well.
Several tracks where at one point or another the track deviates and any semblance of balance goes out the window especially when you can go into a tunnel as first and can leave it as 8th without seeing a single person passing you by.
The worst of those being the latter for at least shall I say, the level I call, “Oh god, trees, trees everywhere, also it’s dark and ooh looks like I hit one, and another one. Why did we not install any lights on these ships?”

An extremely large amount of emphasis should be put on the idea that you have to memorise to the point of being able to fly the course in your sleep in order to be able to competently master the game as the tracks are otherwise brutal.

THE COMBAT:
Well, I suppose combat is a bit strongly worded considering you have absolutely no control of anything but your ship.

The game offers a ‘trap’ combat system where unlike Mario Kart games where you pick up weapons, you actually end up picking up ‘booster points’ which have nothing to do with traps as the trap system seems to be based on the following factors (and this is guesswork):

Your position
Other other players position
The type of traps available on the map
So basically the only way for you to “launch a trap” is when the game detects one or multiple of your opponents are within range of the “trap” and you are close enough to them you can trigger it. You also can’t trigger a trap if it is already in use by another player.


Triggering traps doesn’t cost you anything except for the fact that sometimes the window of opportunity is so small it’s a millisecond which just makes me get an urge to keep bashing the trigger button through the whole race otherwise you can miss pretty much all opportunities to do so.

So to be fair the only thing I can really class as “Combat” is the fact you can knock other players away by barrel rolling into them. However, doing the barrel roll attack almost always results in loss of speed for both players involved which means you really are just punishing yourself.

THE GAME MODES:
Antigraviator boasts 4 game modes.

Single Race
Deathmatch Race
Countdown Race
Training
To start off with the simplest, a single race is a simple straightforward race.

A Deathmatch race is a normal race except if you die you are out. Additionally, when the lead player hits the finish line, the player in the last position becomes eliminated.

Antigraviator also has the weird countdown race which is more like a time attack type race with a twist.

Instead of being a normal time attack where you are alone you are actually competing with other players while trying to get to the next checkpoint mark to increase the remaining time on the timer. (However, you will never see the timer because all other HUD elements are on the back of your ship while the timer is in the top left of the screen.)

Finally, there is training which is what it sounds like. You train the track.

THE GAMEPLAY:
And this is where we have been leading up to. How is the gameplay?

As stated before Antigraviator is fast paced and actually quite fun. It’s mostly bug-free as far as I could find anything wrong was on the level with a huge drop where it killed me and respawned me at the edge of the cliff. Which is a bit of I bug I hope.

All the way up to silver league the game was fairly well balanced with the AI steadily getting a more difficult ramping up pretty decently. At no point did I feel the game was unfair or unbalanced. (Until silver league.)

The reason silver league was a bit insulting because two maps get introduced that have too many open paths (see the tracks part of the review) which meant the AI stepped over me like I am a bug.


That is bad to go from 1st every race to 8th just because the worst part being that all the other maps were pretty well balanced but those two aren’t which meant I got genuinely stuck because of the terrible map design of those two.

But up to that point, the game was fun, challenging and engaging.
At first, the game was mostly me and my ship scraping all the corners and after a few races, I was pretty much golden, really getting into the swing of things.

All of the features of the game complement each other pretty nicely when in a match.

If you really are into racing games that go so fast most of the time you can’t even mentally realise where things are until the next time you pass by them then this is definitely the game for you.

WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO DO GOOD IN THE GAME:
Most of the skill is bred from repeatedly doing the same map until you start remembering the track.

Other than the map memory the skill is hitting the boost pads, picking up the booster charges, boosting at the right times, not hitting anything and most importantly evade the traps. (Quick hint, the only way to avoid the missile is by out-speeding it far enough for it to hit something else.)

THE SCORES:
GRAPHICS: 8/10
MUSIC: 10/10
GAMEPLAY: 6.2/10 (31/50)
-Singleplayer Campaign: 4/10
-Multiplayer: CNR (Could not review)
-Customisation: 3/10
-Playability: 6/10
-Entertainment: 9/10
-Bug/Issues: 9/10

FINAL SCORE: 8.1/10 (24.2/30)

IN CONCLUSION
The graphics and music really make the experience enjoyable and coupled together with the fun (but a bit flawed) gameplay. It is a solid game I would definitely recommend for anyone who enjoys fast-paced racing gameplay.