Recent reviews by Sebenko

Paths bugged out and said my park wasn't connected to the outside world. lol

Good concept, but currently has some deal breaking flaws:
-No rebindable controls.
-Godawful mouse acceleration, especially at low FPS.
-No support for resolutions above 1920x1080

Micromanagement: the game.

Literally the worst first impressions I've ever had in a game.
Select New Game, get presented a list of apparently equal factions. Click the very first option on the list because the concept sounded cool in the intro movie, and get a pop-up demanding almost the sale price of the game to be allowed to play them.

Not sure if it's equal to or worse than Dragon Age Origin's "Help save my family for one easy payment of $9.99" in-camp DLC advertisement NPC.

Moving to 3D ruined this game.
Instead of being tile based like Abe's Oddysee, the game uses modern floaty granular movement. If you've played the original, you'll remember how important crouching right next to something dangerous like a meat grinder and moving quickly is. In New n Tasty, pressing left doesn't just turn you around, it moves you slightly in the direction you pressed. For a game based around precise movement, this totally ruins the game.

Take, for example the first secret area, whre there are a series of meat grinders and a lever to control how fast they move- standing next to the lever, if you pull it, crouch and turn left to face the meat grinder, you then die as Abe moves slightly into the way of it.

Using the steam controller was also frustrating, as the default config refused to work until I switched to a community one and back and enabled an Xbox config option in steam's big picture settings. Having analog movement where you start moving slowly as soon as the analog stick is moved even slightly mean getting under the fast meat grinders in the first secret area is pretty much impossible, too.

Only a few minutes of my time were actually playing the game, most of it was trying to get the controller working. Long enough to decide I'd much rather play the original.

Awful, just awful.
If you want a 2D iso/hex based RPG, play Fallout 1 or 2. If you want to run around subway tunnels, play Metro 2033 or Last Light.

Underrail is a collection of everything wrong with 90s RPGs, and is somehow proud of that fact. The writing is acceptable and the graphics are somewhat sub-par. Neither of these issues are what really make me hate this game, though. The big killers are combat and movement. The balancing is totally out of whack, combat is buggy and the movement is terminally slow. The vaunted oddity XP system is poorly implemented, too.

First, the main way the game warns you of threats is to wait until you blunder into them, then kill you. For example, most towns are bordered by military checkpoints. But then some areas are no go areas, and your only way of finding out is to walk in and see if you get shot. Other times, the game expects you to use stealth. You can tell because you'll be instantly killed when combat starts.

Combat is a slog that enforces constant save scumming and hoping for good RNG. Combat is extremely lethal, and unlike good high-lethality systems, it's entirely luck based. Most combat lasts for one or two rounds, and will be decided by who gets the first stun or instant kill attack off. If your first round burst fire or flashbang fails, you will end up getting stunned or having ludicrously high debuffs stacked on your character. Because only high level armour protects against more than one or two damage types, even getting a suit of heavy metal armour won't protect you from being dropped instantly by enemies wielding energy or explosive weapons. Even if you do resist the damage type the enemy deals, that's no guarantee you'll survive. For example, one city is littered with stealthed enemies that ambush you with low damage knives. Their attacks deal a debuff that reduces your strength by 2 points (on an out-of-ten scale), and stacks up to three times. Even with maxed strength, you'll probably be too weak to wield your weapon and thus be unable to hit your enemy while they bleed you down. Or they'll use a crossbow, take off half your HP then stun you so they can take the other half the next turn.
Then there are the combat related bugs (despite seeing claims otherwise). For example, if you succeed at stunning all enemies in combat with a flashbang or the like, the game will decide that combat is over because there are no threats. There is a cooldown on manually initiating combat again, which lasts longer than the stun will. Although you can just attack to start combat again, there are multiple issues with this. First, it means the game is suddenly no longer turn based, so if you don't rush you'll miss your chance, which is just wrong in a turn based game. Second, burst fire attacks (one of the main strengths of assault rifles) don't work outside combat- although you can use them, they will bug out, only firing one shot of the 7+ and still using the full action point cost of the attack. Plus, if you hit with that one bullet, it will cancel the stun- totally cancelling any advantage your use of stuns might have provided.
The tooltip for hit percentage doesn't consider negatives for moving and attacking, so will not tell you if you don't have enough AP to move and attack, and won't tell you that your hit chance will go down because there's a hit chance buff that you get for not moving, and is not factored in if you have to move to make the attack.
Some perks are beyond useless- there's a perk that reduces the cooldown of the flashbang grenade from eight turns to seven. As I said, combat generally lasts a couple of turns at most. A battle lasting seven turns just doesn't happen, and if it does it's because you're stunlocked against one of those knife wielding muggers I mentioned.

Movement is also a pain in the arse, as the default movement speed is slow, and there is no effective way to increase it to anything reasonable. Plus, many things reduce your movement speed- being overencumbered (which you will be, as each trader buys a limited amount of stuff), wearing heavy armour, most of the debuffs enemies apply to you, and sneaking. Another minefield (literally) is the way the game isn't actually grid based. Although you choose where to move based on a grid, your movement is not limited to that grid. If you move at a slight diagonal, your character will move directly along that diagonal, effectively occupying every tile they straddle. This means that you bump into NPCs constantly, and your character won't move around them until you re-tell them to move. More importantly, if you even slightly brush a tile with a trap in it, the trap will trigger, either killing you or stopping you moving for 10-15 seconds. Although my playtime is into the double figures in hours, most of that time was spend waddling painfully slowly around towns trying to find vendors that would accept my pile of guns and armour.

Finally, the oddity XP system is crap (Although there is a 'classic' XP system too, I haven't tried it as I have no interest in spending another five hours finishing the intro quest again). With the oddity system, you get XP for picking up specific items in the world- for example, trophies from slain enemies, or found alongside valuable loot, and you can get a limited amount of XP from each item- so you might find a scrap sculpture in a box, which will be worth 1XP, and you can gain XP from up to ten of those scraptures. Although good in theory, what it ends up being is a system that forces you to wander (slowly, remember) around every town searching bins for instructional flyers and discarded floppy disks to scrounge up another level. As each oddity type is limited in how many of them you can learn from, you'll get more XP from bins than from fighting enemies. Although some of the trophies from enemies grant a couple of XP a time, you often can only learn from two or three before the game cuts that particular oddity off- while the bins in towns contain a couple of different types of oddity, and each of them has a limit in the 8-10 range. Because the game is very harsh with skill and attribute requirements, you need every level you can get- if you want to play a combat focused character, you better start with 9 strength, otherwise the real tough armour will be unusable to you.

This game should not be proud of ignoring every improvement in quality of life and design that has been thought of in the last twenty years. If this game had come out twenty years ago, it would not be fondly remembered.

Edit 6/11/2017: HONK HOOOOOONK.

Brigador is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fantastic.

The game takes place in the city of Solo Nobre, caught in a multi-faction civil war after the death of great leader. You play a Brigador, a mercenary mech/tank/hoverthing pilot promised a huge paycheck in return for ensuring your mysterious paymasters take control of the city.

General gameplay consists of piloting some form of vehicle through a city with totally destructible terrain. Both you and enemies have directional armour, rewarding flanking, stealth and use of noise. Buildings block line of sight, weapons cause noise both when fired and on impact and enemies will hunt you based on where they last saw or heard you. There's a joy to be had blowing up a fuel station, diving down a side street and waiting for hostiles to investigate then sneaking around and ambushing them from behind.

The game is split into two parts: Campaign and Freelance. Campaign gives you a linear series of missions, and a choice of four vehicles in each missions, roughly corresponding to easy-very hard difficulties. You're let loose in some sector of the city and leave most of it a smoking wreck.

Freelance, however, is where the game truly comes alive- choose a pilot, choose from an extensive list of vehicles, choose a weapon loadout, then choose a mission. Your pilot sets how difficult your mission will be- from The Auditor, who encounters no enemies whatsoever, to later characters who start at MAX difficulty and stay there. In between, there are several dozen characters with varying difficulty curves, where their difficulties (and payouts) increase for each sector of the city you move through. Vehicles range from monster mechs, to tiny anti-grav hover vehicles. Highlights include a tower of scrap cars on tracks and a motorbike with room for a gun almost its own size. Weapons are lovingly varied and include railguns, chainguns, rockets, artillery and machine guns.
Missions start you in one district of Solo Nobre, and end when you reach the starport. They range from short jaunts through four outskirts sectors to the 36-sector, no-early-exit behemoth of a mission at the high end. Each district, you are expected to destroy anti-orbital guns, remove officers and cause general havoc.
I eventually favoured a pair of rapid-fire railguns, on the fastest mech that could support them, sprinting through districts, shooting through buildings and flanking tough enemies. Other times I'd attempt to use a heavy mech wielding cluster artillery- never got the hang of it, but the joy of a single shot clearing most of the screen, buildings and all, never got old.

Brigador is a joy to play, heartily recommended.

It's like Factorio, but instead of building huge sprawling factories, you build arbitrary strings of awkwardly shaped devices. Then the end product stops being useful because the AI patented it.

Take Factorio and replace supply lines with frustration.

It's a big stupid RPG. Voice acting is awful, the plot is stupid and the graphics are sub-par for the time. But tooling around in an oversized truck/landship is fun, the combat is a laugh and the truck parts make customising interesting. For the £0.80 I paid, totally worth.

Thoroughly unpleasant from start to finish. You are dragged into a small, cramped map, divested of all your gear and sent marching off to rescue three mostly irritating NPCs. The characters are fairly well written, but are for the most part completely unlikeable. The environment is horrible, dull muddy red-brown and far too dark and enclosed. The layout itself is repetitive and mazelike, which means stumbling around until you find the correct identical alleyway or ruined store to enter.

The gameplay of the DLC is infuriating at every turn. All the enemies you encounter are awkward to kill, requiring dismemberment or disabling a hidden object some distance away. In between these fights are hundreds of traps, mainly bear traps, that you won't see because of the horrible environment. The weapons you are given to fight these enemies are disappointing at best, ranging from a knife, to a knife on a stick all the way up to a clean knife on a stick. Guns are also available, but ammunition is so scarce that their only use is taking out the constant speakers. Speakers and radios placed around the DLC set your bomb collar off if not found in time, and the DLC delights in hiding them in corners where they are nearly impossible to see, leaving you sprinting around until your head pops, then trying again when you know where they are.

There are also no side quests, only the main quest, which consists entirely of tracking back and forth across the terrible DLC environment escorting the three NPCs to and from their stations. There is also no fast travel permitted within the DLC, which drags out the unpleasant slog that is playing Dead Money unbearably. The one redeeming feature of this DLC is that it is mercifully short, and there's not much to miss by ignoring the side areas. At best, it feels like that early part of the game where all your weapons are ♥♥♥♥ and you're waiting to get better ones- except that you already have the good weapons, they're just locked away outside the DLC.

You are also unable to leave before the main quest is finished, so if you decide you hate it and want to get out of there, your only hope is to have made a new save not too long before you started Dead Money.