Recent reviews by Commissar

The story is fine and good, but the level scaling and the way the fights operate is genuinely unpleasant and leads to what I've considered the worst savescumming in my entire gaming lifetime.

The fights are tedious, unfair, and an absolute slog due to how the game arbitrarily limits you in your offensive capabilities and the damage output of the enemies is as numerically cruel as it is nonsensical. A fun aesthetic, some good gear, and a genuinely fun story with a potentially satisfying ending are weighted down by how nasty it feels to actually play the moment you get into combat.

I don't regret playing it but I genuinely did not have fun while I was doing so.

If Fallout: New Vegas didn't have the politics of a 5 year-old liberal during the early War on Terror then it'd probably look a lot like this: writing not based in weird, racist and classist biases. With some effort, it allows you to choose a truly good ending for everything - it isn't easy, but it's well worth it. It has the good humor and fun that Wasteland always has, which is more or less like the non-isometric Fallouts with similar whacky antics, builds, and self-referential humor.

Avoid the Steeltown DLC. Horrible gameplay despite it's story. Holy Detonation is fun, fair, and pretty difficult!

A well-balanced isometric game until you get to the high levels. The level scaling in this game is very uneven and you will be initiating some fights just because otherwise you're going to get wiped in 3 seconds.

A worthy threequel overall and a great sequel that builds upon Wasteland 2.

A fun, highly randomized feeling global espionage game. Definitely the kind geared towards multiple playthroughs with an element of a steep learning curve. Once you know what you're doing, and how the game works, it's fairly easy to cheese.

Everything up until that point is a little rough, so if you don't like losing a playthrough or two before you 'get it,' then I wouldn't recommend it.

It's amusing how easily intentional disorientation can be mistaken for bad game design.

NORTH generally straddles a line between arthouse and dog droppings. The game portion is just patently unfun, with a visually muddy map that is difficult to wander through thanks to no pause menu and minimal options. The character art and, specifically, the immigration office, look beautiful and haunting in their own way.

The /narrative/ disorientation, however, works wonderfully. The way it broadcasts the othering is fantastic, and at a brisk 30-40 minutes. A good, but very technically flawed, narrative game that I recommend to people who aren't scared of the word 'art,' but also only to those who can handle some intentional and unintentional gameplay frustrations.

Not for a casual person who needs a game to be easy or intuitive.

Finally, I can play the games my parents would never let me at the local Nathan's.

The Darkness 1 is way, way better. But also it's better than most games. Very fun and cool, and it shows the design philosophy that Digital Extremes would carry on to all of it's future titles. Generally a great game, hindered by a comparison to it's predecessor mostly due to the stylistic differences between Starbreeze's grittiness and Digital Extremes' more comic book centered style.

At it's core, Observer is a 50/50 split.

There is the neo-noir cyberpunk thriller and then there is the itch.io slenderman generic horror game drek. When it errs towards the former, it's refreshing and interesting. When it touches the latter? It's just bad. Insultingly bad... Bloober Team bad. With their Blair Witch and The Medium games, it's clearly been proven that generic and poorly done jumpscare boring horror is what they want to do. It is simply unfortunate that they are so freakin' bad at it.

Observer starts strong, leans heavily into the cyberpunk neo-noir but as the game goes on there is less and less of an investigation, less of that neo-noir, less of that cyberpunk in general that it ends up as this series of muddy, derivative spoooooky jumpscares and forced stealth segments that are designed entirely around the concept of "there is a big goofy guy you need to crouch away from or he'll GET YA!" and riveting mid-2010's horror imagery such as "what if the walls were made of meat... and had a heartbeat!"

The longer the game went on, the more I felt like a cheap sideshow presenter was trying to convince me his dime-a-dozen ghost story actually was really scary while wiggling his fingers and going "BOoOOoOoOo!"and slapping my hands with a switch every time I asked about the more interesting story that he forgot about.

At this point in time we know that Bloober Team makes mediocre psychological horror games with 0 finesse and laughably bad writing. In 2017, we had hope for this fun studio despite Layers of Fear being mediocre and this showing great potential in it's first half. Observer is barely a game, but it is a fun game for the majority of it's time.

Rutger Hauer and the worldbuilding that surround Observer are more interesting than everything else the game has to offer and it's worth it for Rutger Hauer alone - but as the game gets into it's latter half and then sprints to the ending you can turn your brain off: their stumbling, atrophied sprint to the finish line is perfectly in line with the majority of their sub-par body of work, and will especially resonate with the smooth brained Marvel movie and "the curtains are just blue" crowd.

Killing Floor... but worse!

Blood and Zombies is a budget tower defense game where you hold off hordes of zombies with janky movement, controls, and a dead multiplayer element.

If you can pick it up on sale with a few friends then a few sessions of play will give you everything you'll want out of this one. It doesn't take long to feel like you've experienced everything the game has to offer, but if you do enjoy a standard tower defense game then making defenses and blasting zombies will prove to be fun, as the enemy types and number increase steadily. Not bad, not exceptional, but just "fine."

An adorable, easy-going bridge builder where you can launch little dudes on snowboards into the stratosphere. All the goodness of a bridge builder with the added benefit of these little suckers splat good.

For a game made in such a comparatively short time when put up against the base ATOM RPG, Trudograd is just every little bit from the first game and all the more.

While not as long as the first game, the story is much tighter and the writing (specifically the English translation) is top tier. It takes itself seriously when it needs to, but the occasional joke isn't amiss. Another plus? Trudograd isn't filled with weirdly conservative sex workers who shame you for being gay. The quests, character advancement, and combat are all top notch and I fully believe that ATOM RPG is a wonderful indie title with the quality of a AA release like Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3 - but with a unique identity that cements itself as something truly Eastern European with a great soundtrack, beautiful post-nuclear apocalyptic environments and memorable characters.