Recent reviews by tectix

This game is sooooo under appreciated.

It's hard to express the journey of this game because it's a real challenge: testing your ability to comprehend abstract concepts and your ability hold multiple disparate things in your head. It was mind boggling, but in the best possible way.

The closest game I can think of as an analog is Outer Wilds because of the puzzle, the way it's solved, and the way everything fits together. It may not have the characters or breadth, but you can really feel the amount of care and thought that went into this single-map experience.

The concept is charming and finds a way to be both familiar and utterly perplexing. The developer somehow found the perfect amount of progress to bake into each step in the process of figuring out the puzzle, making each step feel like a revelation, and none feeling like a tedious errand.

The atmosphere is both inviting (colorful, friendly), but also mysterious, and in some cases foreboding.

This game took a while to win me over, and I was this close to quitting, but I am very very glad I didn't because the satisfaction of completing it was INTENSE! If you're playing this and are struggling with the difficulty. You're not alone! But keep at it. Try everything you can think of!

It is an excellent example of the expression of a single-dev experience.

I never thought a simple poker-style game could be so good

This is a great episode of star trek, or maybe a Star Trek movie even. I can't say it's a great video game. A good one, but not great.

The story pretty good, very classic Star Trek IMO. No notes :)

The writing is competent and engaging. Most characters feel fleshed out and like they have a backstory.

Of the 2 player characters: Carter feels a bit more alive than Jara. He just has more energy and seems to have more to say about the situations he's in. It is very cool to play as a first officer as Jara, though, having to make quick, tough decisions in various degrees of danger.

The gameplay is very simple, reminiscent of older Telltale Games style. Telltale Games has since evolved their mechanics beyond this, though. This game feels like it was developed 10 years ago. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it just might not meet your expectations. I did feel like my choices mattered, but not as much as I was wanting. This style is best suited for story telling. Like the telltale games, the combat is rare and simplistic. I did like

There are a multitude of glitches and oddities. I got stuck several times due to bugs (I think most of them were due to using a high frame rate). At one point, I thought I'd have to completely restart because a game breaking glitch kept occurring until it randomly decided not to. They did fix one issue with an update, but the fact that it got through speaks to the QA (or lack thereof) at the game studio. And I've yet to see any additional updates addressing the other issues I faced.

The graphics are weird. There are very few options and cracking open the config file gives you only a few more. The anti-aliasing is just about the worst I've seen from a modern game. I can't explain it, it just looks really bad, especially around small details. The depth-of-field effect looks okay for the most part (you have the usual issues like transparent textures looking like panes of glass, or an object having a blurry ring around it). But some scenes are just completely out of focus! Like a BOTW movie that was shot on camera in the 80s! I've never, ever seen that in a game and it completely breaks the immersion. Especially in cut scenes where a character is revealing or reacting to something.

The animation is bizarre. It's as if they used 3 different game engines bodged together. Some animations run at a forced 24 fps. This would be okay as a stylistic choice (wanting to look cinematic), but it's completely inconsistent. It's not that cut scenes are 24 fps and everything else is whatever your GPU can muster (some games do this, and while it's not my preference, it is a legitimate creative choice). It's like some objects/characters were animated at a forced 24 fps, some at forced 60 fps, and some actually use tweening (allowing them to look smooth at higher frame rates). Several different objects can have these 3 different frame rates at the same time on screen! There are some action scenes with a lot going on and you can see the different rates all going at once all over the place. Sometimes a character (even the player) will suddenly switch from buttery smooth animation to a choppy 24 fps for movement and back again for the next. For example, when you're in combat, your character can do a roll from one cover to another. But this roll animation is at 24fps! So it feels like your character suddenly turns into a flip-book. Everything else in the scene is at 60 or at >120, so it sticks out and breaks one's concentration. I have never seen this, it's completely weird and distracting. There are examples of lower fps being used for stylistic choice (Spider-Man: Miles Morales, for example) or for performance (several Nintendo games), but these are done in a way that makes sense!

The textures range from very good looking in some places to looking slapped together and crappy in others. There is very little consistency of quality. I prefer consistency to fidelity. I don't mind simplistic textures if I know that's what to expect throughout. Outer Wilds did this excellently. I never once thought about the textures as I was playing even though they were low fidelity because it was consistent.

Another indication of poor QA: the subtitles had several typos and mismatches with the speech. It's not a big deal, but couldn't they pay someone to just play the game and check that? How much would that have cost?

I bet most people won't care too much about the various issues I listed above. They basically come down to a lack of polish and incompetent QA. Which is why I am recommending this. But I would like to see those game-breaking glitches addressed...

If you like Star Trek, you will probably enjoy the story & the characters. If you're not a fan you might still like it's telltale gameplay mechanics and its isolated story (you do not need to know anything about Star Trek to understand everything that's happening, you may just miss a reference here or there).

This game is awesome. Very laid-back, relaxing gameplay. Very interesting story, and a pleasing art style. The puzzles are unique and challenging, and strike a nice balance between knowledge (reading in-game notes, books), and intuition. The characters are fun to interact with (especially the cat! 😺). Definitely recommend this

I've been a fan of the Ratchet & Clank games since the original on PS2. This is definitely the best entry in the series as it improves on the designs, animations, graphics, and weapons. They were able to expertly weave realistic textures and animations together with the classic R&C cartoon style which was a real showing of the skills of PlayStation Studios' artists.

While this kind of story has been done a millions times before, it still has a bit of charm from the comedic characters, but there's pretty much no surprises except for the maybe very young players. You don't go to many interesting places. Each location could be any other with a generic coat of paint like the pirate land, dinosaur planet, etc. The only interesting place is the starting city planet, but it really only serves as a tutorial location. It would have been great to come back to that place a few times and see it really expanded.

The gameplay is pretty good as usual for a R&C game. Nothing spectacular as it's just a shooter with some platforming, but it's quite smooth, very quick paced without feeling overwhelming and, in my play through at least, very stable with very few bugs / glitches to note. There were a few instances where I got stuck, or an enemy (emperor nefarious in one case during the final battle) making it easy to throw missiles freely at him for a bit until the next health-cased animation trigger.

Overall a very good entry in the series. Maybe the best, but I haven't played them all. The graphics and gameplay are good reasons to check this game out.

Was really looking forward to this game finally coming out on PC. But alas, the crashing, Tried many things, could not get it past loading the shaders in the menu.

tl;dr pretty fun and challenging, interesting variety, but could use a little more.

I saw Vinny Vinesauce playing this and was instantly interested because it has a cool style, and it seemed very easy to pick up (and it is!)

The trick is finding the right stack of upgrades that match with your weapon/character trait. The different weapons are super fun to figure out and to see how the different upgrades affect them. The bat gun is my favorite!

The best part is when you get past the 15 minute mark, and you’ve got a really synergistic upgrade set, so you can just mow down enemies left and right 😈

Especially for the price, this game is a no brainier to get into for short 15 minute sprints or lengthy marathons.

From (from) the ashes of depravity rises the phoenix of quality. How else to describe The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe? Such a revolutionary step forward in the lineage of one of the most beloved video game properties of all time! The additions and changes made to this expansion will surely resonate in the annals of the history of all media ever made.

It is perhaps true to say that no mistakes are forever etched in stone, for the stone into which The Stanley Parable was carved has itself been transmuted, offering a message of hope to those who have ever erred in their judgement. You are not beyond redemption. You may change and you may become more; so much more than you were before.

If there is any message to be taken from The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, it is this:

"What a fortune, a privilege, a joy it is to have had such an experience! It leaves me hopeful that as a community - as a world, there is time for us to become our greatest selves, as great as we ever could dream of in our wildest, most ambitious visions for a brighter future."

I'd recommend this game if it were still 2015 or 2016, but unfortunately this game's age is showing because parts of it are no longer working. Who knows why, but I tried everything I could find online to fix the issues I was experiencing with no success. It's a pretty awesome concept. The gameplay is cool, the music is amazing, and the graphics are pretty to look at. But I was unable to complete several of the objectives and achievements because the "Agents" refused to appear despite my attempts to fix it.

Don't get this game if you want to finish it or have the full experience advertised. But I'd still recommend it if you don't really care about that.

I don't know what could be said about this game that hasn't already. If you've always wanted absolute control over a tribe/colony with either a tender touch or an iron fist, this is the game for you...