Recent reviews by Shepherd

Starship 2pers

A 3rd-person 4-player co-op live service game with instanced missions that you choose the difficulty of, a la Deep Rock Galactic. Super Earth needs you to drop on alien planets and eliminate humanity's enemies (currently, there's Bugs and Terminators) with excessive force, and you are allotted an assortment of weapons and orbital bombardments with which to spread Managed Democracy™. These tools WILL get you and your friends comically maimed, and this will happen more when you play with rando's.

I'm having a grand old time with it, and I'm so happy to see the PSN drama subsiding. The developers behind this game are doing some quality work, and I'm excited to see how bad things can get in-universe.

It's alright

A gem in the rough, polished by a single dev and an enormous modding community that loves working for The Company. You have 3 days to collect some $ amount of scrap items from alien moons full of weird and violent aliens, and your team is grossly unprepared. 1-4 players, but it's best with 2-4 players.

Pros:
- Proximity voice chat. It's immersive! Hear your friend getting their neck snapped by a monster in some adjacent room? Unfortunate, but not your immediate problem!
- The 3-day quota is short enough to be like ~30 minutes, which makes for nice chunks of game sessions with your crew.
- Because The Company doesn't explain anything, a lot of the experience is figuring out how things work and what interacts with what. It's a lot at first, but people are eager to help newbies get to the objective and get out safe. Otherwise you'll all be penalized for dying, moreso if your dead comrades' bodies aren't recovered!
- ENORMOUS modding community that can make the game easier, harder, more accessible, more upsetting, or just different! Do not shirk at the idea of modding, it's easy, convenient, and r2modman is always better than the Overwolf Thunderstore.

Cons:
- Melee combat is spotty as hell, and hitboxes suck. Protip, don't use the "Arachnaphobia" setting, it'll mess up your ability to tell where spiders actually are. I added a mod that triples melee damage, and it has made choosing violence actually viable without trivializing the game. I also added a mod that removes all spiders. Nobody has told me that that's a buzzkill, and you too should say "♥♥♥♥ spiders".
- The UI does the Silent Hill thing where it doesn't show your actual health in digits, and that makes it hard to know when to start playing it safe. Mods fix this!
- Rounds where you suddenly died from a slip + fall can be really really aggravating. I almost didn't play more of this game cuz I was always the first to die, and the one time I stayed in the ship, nobody took walkie talkies, leaving me alone to watch them play from the radar. It sucked, and it can be really frustrating.
- Procedural generation + the "Inverse Teleporter" can get players stuck behind locked doors or spawned right on top of insta-kill enemies. It's a funny mechanic, but it has left me and many of my friends extremely hesitant to ever acquire it since it can ruin runs immediately. As far as I know, there isn't a mod that can guarantee this won't happen, but there are mods that let you teleport with certain items instead of just forcing you to drop everything upon teleporting.
- Early Access, the game has bugs and those can easily get exacerbated by mods. There aren't many planets (static maps) and there are even fewer dungeon tilesets (procedurally generated maps on each planet), so you will want to mod some more in. Aquatis and Atlantis are easy recommendations from me.
- Proximity voice chat doesn't apply to walkie-talkies. There's a mod that fixes that, though!

Download r2modman to extend the base game's functionalities and increase the player party limit from 4 to 16+, you won't regret it. It also adds hella cosmetics!

A neat lil retro horror game about going fishing with your friend! Low difficulty, nice pacing, not long, and it's possible to experience 100% of it within 2 hours. Totally worth the $2 USD price tag I got it for.

Easy recommendation for fans of single-player city-builders, puzzles, and/or roguelites. Individual games have semi-random selections of 3 (currently out of 5) races that will join your settlement somewhere in a world frequently beset by ultra-violent storms. You need woodcutters to expand your living space and work space, but that makes the environment more hostile, which makes villagers unhappy. You need as many resources as possible, and can use rainwater (both falling rain and underground springs) to get more resources faster, but using rainwater invites corrupting growths that damage your buildings. All the while you must keep a fire burning with whatever resources you can find, and protect that fire from the corrupting growths.

These mechanics are introduced slowly and at a pace of your choosing- you never have to raise the difficulty of any individual settlement you start, if you'd rather not worry about rainwater or harder Win conditions. Higher difficulty games will reward more of the special currencies used for unlocking bonuses to all future runs, but it never feels like those bonuses break the game. At best, they give you a better chance at an OK start to a potentially disastrous settlement choice. There's -always- a way to salvage things, and even 170+ hours in, I've never lost a settlement. People have left, people have starved to death, people have been sacrificed at altars to long-forgotten gods. But it never got so bad that the Queen felt the need to punish me! (Prestige level 2 sounds fun, but I'm comfy at Prestige 1).

It's currently in active development, so several of my settlements were prematurely ended due to new mechanics or rebalancing. This didn't upset me because, much like losing a settlement, you still get -some- special currency for use in the next games. I'm not saying the game is easy, good golly no. But the development team has made something REALLY special, and is regularly releasing new content and bugfixes that I haven't personally had any gameplay issues with.

This is an easy recommendation from me, Against The Storm is worth the full price of admission. Even more worth it if on sale. I'd buy DLC if they announced it, and I'd eagerly await word on any games that this team works on in the future. Very promising stuff.

The comparisons to Wario Land 4 are apt, but only as far as style goes. In terms of substance, Pizza Tower stands on it own as a beefed-up love letter to what Wario Land 4 could have been if it was made for something more powerful than a GameBoy Advance.

Pros:
- Incredible spritework, so many extra frames that reek (in the best ways) of cartoon slapstick.
- SLAPPING music, with plenty of weird and goofy samples tossed in for good measure. If you remember Wario Land 4's OST, you'll be very pleasantly surprised. Seriously, go look up Pizza Tower's OST if nothing else, "Pizza Time" is a SLAPPER
- Intuitive and flexible movement mechanics through levels that teach you how to get around before throwing you into the deep end. Never did I feel completely stuck or potentially soft-locked.
- No health bars except in boss battles, and you can only run out of time in the escape segments when you flee the level. So if you're just figuring out the map or searching for all of the secrets, you can take endless damage from enemies or falling off the stage without ending the run.
- ...and when you CAN lose to running out of time, it's generous! If you look up videos of people doing levels "Perfectly", you'll notice plenty of times that they mess up or take damage or waste time, but still get to the exit with room to spare. I think that's nice, lowering the ceiling for what constitutes a run good -just- enough to be within reason.

Cons:
- The difficulty ceiling IS still pretty high, with some decent reflexes and knowledge of the map required to 100% the game and collect those P-rank runs. I do not intend on 100%ing this since it could turn into a frustrating time sink for me, along with limited patience for my failed runs. Notsomuch a complaint as a detail worth noting.
- uhhhhh not enough levels where you play as Gustavo & Brick? Every level has unique mechanics that are usually limited to the level they're introduced in, but it felt like G&B were only in a level or 2 every other floor. Very minor complaint, still a varied and interesting game always changing things up bit by bit.

I had a wonderful time with Pizza Tower, and would immediately buy DLC with the OST and/or any additional content. The developer clearly cares a lot about movement in platformers and how to make it as fun and engaging as possible. The art direction is inspired, the music dials 1-800-ARE-YOU-SLAPPIN, and getting to the end isn't a torturous struggle.

Get Pizza Tower! On sale, for full price, WHATEVER. It's easily one of the best 2D platformers I've ever played, period.

Finally, I can say that I've finished Antimatter Dimensions.

My computer spent ~862 hours spinning CPU cycles making numbers go up. Was it worth it? No. To put that in perspective, I like incremental games, and I'm definitely susceptible to number-go-up dopamine skinner-boxes. This is not the first one I've spent hundreds of hours on. But this was far less deep and far less satisfying than anything else I've dived into.

Mechanically, the game is balanced, finished, and without bugs or lag-spikes. Whether it's finishable within a reasonable amount of time is something I'll let you draw your own conclusions on, because I was following a guide for most of it, and that was still 800+ hours. Lots of tinkering with real-time maths was clearly done, and it's genuinely impressive how many twists and turns in strategy were required for me to finish. I applaud Hevipelle on making a complete and complex incremental game. I played some of it back on the web browser version some years ago, but didn't get as far as I have here. I blame Steam achievements for motivating me to start over and go through with the rest of it.

THAT SAID, beyond the unique mechanics and challenges presented throughout the game, it felt very devoid of story/lore/motivation to finish. The writing is spread extremely thin, and only really starts in the latter half (?) of the game. Everything you're doing is vague and abstract, which I'm okay with! But it makes finishing each act feel empty and anticlimactic. I am not entirely sure what it was I accomplished beyond reaching infinite infinities dozens of different ways until the game decided I was done doing that. Plus, some of the dialogue at the end was grammatically weird. It wasn't a deal-breaker, but it did frustrate me.

Does that make this a bad game? No. Heck, I feel as though I should have given Hevipelle some of my money, tbh, considering how many hours of entertainment I got. I do still feel that residual dopamine rush of seeing [end-game mechanic] number go up. I'm relieved to say that I was never tempted to give the game money to make numbers go up slightly faster, because there are micro-transactions for individual mechanic multipliers. That has bothered me ever since I started the Steam version of this game, and it still rubs me the wrong way. They're not required to finish, and there's a big ol' disclaimer on their tab mentioning that. But the presence of them at all felt way worse than something like a link to donate or an outright entry fee to download and start the game.

I would NEVER play this again, and I would NEVER tell my friends that it's worth experiencing for any unique game design choices.

Go play A Dark Room. Go play Universal Paperclips. Hell, go play Cookie Clicker. They're shorter, their narratives are more concrete, and they don't require you to learn an in-game scripting language that you will need to change up several times while figuring out the next prestige mechanic. Those games don't require you to closely follow a guide in order to most efficiently re-re-re-clear the same 12 challenges you did before in an efficient order. There are more satisfying games out there that cost actual money and are shorter than this.

You aren't missing anything by not playing all the way through Antimatter Dimensions. It's stupidly long, it doesn't pay off, and my enjoyment has been almost entirely based on reaching 100% achievements. Do not bother with this game. The $0 price tag is a trap.

Deceptively simple arcade game about looking for any vampires. You can even play it 1-handed, just need WASD and the Space bar. You _can_ use a controller for fine-tuned movement, but I was more than content having stiff movement controls. The music is good, the character and monster sprites don't feel like a small handful of Castlevania sprites with the serial numbers filed off, and there's a LOT of stuff to unlock. And they tell you how to do most of it, which I think is a good thing. I only had to look up a couple esoteric riddles, and that was for secret characters that have nothing to do with my need to farm achievements.

I still wanna play more after having achieved 100%, and that's _really_ rare for me. I love roguelikes/roguelites, but if there isn't anything to do past the last few not-ridiculous achievements, I kinda lose interest. Even after doing everything the achievements recommended I do to unlock things, there's still more to discover, and I could easily lose another 50 hours trying out other characters and builds and levels with various difficulty combinations that ALWAYS feel worth gambling on.

My only complaint- I don't think it counts as a bullet-hell, by the standard definition? All enemies just bee-line for you, and I don't remember any actually shooting stuff at me. The real bullets were the weak enemies spawning between strong enemies, and so I had to weave around and through the monsters I knew (or thought I knew) I could kill without taking any contact damage. The individual enemies are the bullets, their spawn rate is tied to specific events each minute on the clock, and they always spawn just beyond the edge of your screen. And they respawn somewhere just offscreen around your new position if you try to run away. Very odd, but makes for some interesting chase sequences.

Very easy to recommend if you like arcade shmups with a retro vibe to them. You'll know the vampire when you see it. ;)

I had a great time with Sonic Frontiers! It's a little rough around the edges and isn't going to win any game of the year awards, but for a Sonic title? Being "Just Good" is a major accomplishment worthy of praise. The open world is fun to boost around in, combat is a bit button-mashy but it looks and feels cool, and the writing is comparatively superior to any other Sonic game I've played. Without coming off as edgy or campy, even.

Pros:
+ Running in the overworld feels good, and the buggy moments are manageable.
+ Wide moveset that gets wider with skill point allocation. You START with light-dash, you just won't get a tutorial for how to use it till some random load screen.
+ The writing is really good and never got me groaning or annoyed. Eggman especially got great characterization.
+ Fantastic OST, especially during boss fights!
+ Speaking of boss fights- they're hype as hell, and while not terribly difficult, they're cinematic and always feel cool to finish.

Cons:
- "Cyberspace" levels (shorter traditional Sonic levels that are not open-world) are the weakest portion of the game, with wonkier physics and rewards that you eventually find alternate ways to acquire instead of bothering to finish in S-rank time.
- While the island worlds are big and cool and neat, they're littered with grind rails and platforms that are all the same style. There's a grassy island, a desert island, a volcano island... and then they sort of just repeat the grassy/mountain stuff. Sprinkle some ancient ruins and weird tech and you've got slightly uninspiring world design.
- There are stats you level up by collecting certain items throughout the island worlds- a Power item, a Defense item, and then not-koroks for your Ring Capacity and Speed. Power and Defense both get leveled up for as many required Power/Defense items as you've got on hand, but Rings and Speed both require talking to a different NPC, selecting the 2nd and 3rd options from a drop-down menu to select the stat you want to level, and then it levels that stat ONCE. And it takes several seconds to hang on that "Leveled up!" notification before asking if you'd like to level another stat up. Whereupon you'll have to select Rings or Speed again. Having to slowly level up those stats with 198 individual dialogues instead of maybe 20 times with the power/defense NPC was a major pain in the ass.

My verdict: Sonic Frontiers is a solid 6.5 or 7 outta 10. Not perfect, but even a decent Sonic is an impressive Sonic. If it doesn't sound up your alley, look up the boss fights on youtube and give the soundtrack a listen at least. That alone is worth checking out. I got it on sale for like ~$20 USD, and got ~22 hours of playtime. For all the moments I was annoyed/slowed down, there were far more moments where I was zipping around, grinning at Sonic's lines not being painfully cheesy, and having feelings over spoilers. If you like Sonic, absolutely get it if you see its on sale!

A very charming point-and-click adventure with silly mini-games. Some of the mini-games are super accessible, and some are a matter of praying that RNG rolls in your favor. There is no inbetween. The animations are delightful, the writing is fun, and the achievements are not worth trying to 100%. It's good on its own. Don't be like me and spend an hour and a half reloading the game over and over to get the pinball achievement. It won't let you retry pinball if you get the normal high score, and it's liable to gutter all your balls anyway. Just play the rest of the game. It's fun and I had a nice time.