Recent reviews by President Jyrgunkarrd

I am a Marvel Moron. I love all things Marvel very dearly, even when they are bad.

Marvel Snap is a potentially great game that I cannot recommend because too much of the experience is awful. Initial on boarding is great, and then you will experience being basically throw to the wolves and be unable to win any games at all due to a combination of power creep and new, overtuned cards being inaccessible.

The presentation is beautiful. The Marvel cast representation is second to no other game. It is fast. It is, well, snappy. The area control mechanics feel fresh and just much more satisfying than any tired 'play dudes and attack' card game ever will.

But... after a great initial experience, the game basically tells you that you can't play anymore. You're not allowed to have fun and have no hope for having fun in the future. Why? Who knows. The developers certainly don't seem to know why that is somehow an ideal experience.

So, I can't recommend it. It'll just break your heart after you see the potential and then realise you're just not the gazillionaire that is apparently the game's only desired audience.

The game has been ruined. :(

This was one of my favourite roguelike-deckbuilders available, with short runs and incredibly satisfying gameplay. It was not high difficulty, but for me that was part of the appeal - it was a nice thing to quickly play and beat in an afternoon before doing something else.

Everything about the above was just tossed away for no apparent reason. Runs are now a lengthy slog, the game is 'harder' but the difficulty feels artificial & oppressive, all of the fun cards & items have been nerfed, you are no longer allowed to just draw cards & have fun blasting enemies. What's the point?

The developers also reneged on the roadmap and are abandoning... what, 50% of the promised content for the game? More?

And honestly I wouldn't even care about that one bit. Couldn't give one toss about losing half of what was promised because the core gameplay was fun enough... but that was taken away too. So now I'm just going to pursue refund options, because this is no longer an enjoyable game and probably never will be.

This game is not finished, period.

What's one of the most fundamental principles in a colony management game? Logistics. What is essential to logistics? Roads (or equivalent infrastructure).

CE, as of it's 'release' build, has no road implementation.


It's buggy. It still crashes to desktop with alarming regulairty. It still has significant graphical complaints, terrible AI & pathfinding and what appear to be memory leakages.

All of the promise shown in the initial teaser has been binned for the sake of shoving out a '1.0' that is feature incomplete, lacks charm, still has a placeholder UI in many areas. None of the intrigue present in that teaser has made it into the game during it's EA 'journey'.


This will be the last time I buy anything in Early Access; it is too easy for a developer to over-promise and piss away their budget, apparently, and then decide that Official Release is an acceptable emergency button to push for advertising & a new round of purchases when they run out of cash.

I expect this game to meet with middling to terrible reviews and burn away whatever goodwill Gaslamp had earned with Dreadmor; such would be a well deserved fate, too.

It hurts to write this review, because I do love so much about Kerbal Space Program; the Jim Henson-esque aesthetic, the core concept of building & launching large rockets while managing a ramshackle space agency, the educational value of the experience and all that I have personally learned about real world space exploration as a side effect of learning about how to play the game better.

All that said, there is no way I could in good conscience recommend this game to anyone at it's current price, and I think it's a damned shame that the developers decided to declare KSP release-ready in it's current state.


First, the game is an unstable mess. It will randomly crash because you dared to open a menu or scroll through the tech tree. It has serious memory leak issues - I have already experienced a particularly nasty crash that caused my overall PC performance to just tank, requiring a restart that itself took almost half an hour to complete.


Second, Unity has always been and remains this game's largest weakness. The ♥♥♥♥♥♥ engine simply cannot handle KSP's complex physics & collision geometry, and this leads to two big problems:

1) Inconsistent physics behavior. Sometimes things will just bug out and explode, fall apart or ricochet away into deep space for no reason.

2) KSP's late-game content is straight-up broken & unusable. Interactions between space stations and large ships cause the game to drop into single frame numbers, making the game totally unplayable. If you have grandiose dreams of colonizing the Kerbol system with refuelling & science stations, you can just shelve such dreams right now. There is no way in Hell this game should've gone to release without first switching to a better engine.


Third, the UI tools in the game are as Godawful as they've always been. It's not the worst UI I've ever seen, but it's bad. Key features like maneuver nodes will almost always provide incorrect information to the player, making them all but unusable - this is very frustrating for a game that requires precise maneuvering & efficient rocket fuel use. Even rudientary navigation tools are totally absent from the core game, requiring mod support to obtain. Time compression, which is absolutely necessary for planetary exploration, will not work properly on certain tragectories (disobeying commands to warp to given maneuver nodes or even just slow down), making save scumming mandatory.


This is still a beta product at best. It feels far more like a proof of concept than a polished game, leaning very heavily on third party mods to pad-out it's content.

I'm sorry I paid so much money for this.

So, after years of hearing how great this game is & hearing all of the positive press about Bloodborne, I finally took the plunge and bought Dark Souls. Having spent a day playing it, I deeply regret my purchase.

The game is as challenging as anyone claims - but the difficulty is chiefly with the clunky, unresponsive, terribly laid-out controls. If the game were responsive, the bulk of the laughably stupid enemies would pose essentially no threat at all.


The mantra of 'hard yet fair' is nonsense. Most of your deaths will feel cheap - the result of a bungled input because From appears to have taken button layout & UIX cues from the PSX Resident Evil games or the result of an unavoidable one-hit-kill. Very rare will be the death that comes as a result of dueling a boss or smacking around mooks; the generic mobs are only dangerous after you become bored of the 'hold block, wait for enemy to stagger itself against my block, press RB to cleave in two' routine and desperately attempt to do something interesting (which the game's terrible controls will immediately punish). The bosses are just a matter of rolling around their telegraphed attacks and smacking them until they die - you'll occasionally eat it because the fights are a just random mess, so there are no patterns to learn and the boss may happen to decide to spam one of it's 1-frame attacks at you (though they may also choose to sometimes just sit around and do nothing), or the lock-on camera may decide to just spaz out, screwing-up your inputs and camera angle - they have no weak points, no apparent rules governing their actions or behaviors and no context-sensitive actions aside from a lackluster 'rage mode' of sorts once they get low.

The most interesting fights are with mini-boss knight characters at the beginning of the game, but these are far & few between, and some of them are simply too binary: if the knight hits you once, you die. The geometry of the combat is engaging, but you aren't afforded so much as a single error in a game with extremely clunky controls, which makes the fight ultimately just boil down to persisting until you have a lucky run rather than getting a feel for the experience and capitalizing on it.

Grand Theft Auto V plays very similarly to it's predecessors in single player, albeit with some very noticeable & welcome improvements: first person is now an option, and vehicles have reasonably well detailed interiors; the physics engine is quite detailed and vehicle handling is, for the most part, excellent; visuals are an order of magnitude better than IV.

If all that you want is a sexier version of GTA IV with a new map, this game will serve your needs.


Personally, I was expecting better.


Typical to every other GTA game, single player content is gated behind story progression (though, thank goodness, areas of the map aren't arbitrarily blocked-off until certain plot milestones are reached. We're finally beyond that). I've never enjoyed this model, as the plot writing is usually bad (no exception here) and the mission design is mostly mediocre (Vice City remains the king of the franchise in this department). Heists are interesting, but few and far between, and some of them feel almost like MMO wave grinds. I've also never personally enjoyed GTA's hyper-cynicism, though these things will be a matter of taste.

San Andreas remains the king of interactivity for the franchise; a number of vehicles in GTA V are simply set decoration and the number of activities to partake in is roughly equivalent to GTA IV. I'm not terrible bent out of shape about this, as I've always found the mini-games to be a little lacking anyway.

Police chases are very similar to IV. I appreciate the ability to lose the police, but the lack of diversity among police units since Vice City still hurts (cars -> SUVs / Helicopters -> Vans / FBI SUVs). The days of high performance FBI cars, PI sports cars, rapelling special forces and tanks / army trucks seem to be behind us, alas.


The port quality is mediocre. Switching between different texture quality levels requires a reboot of the game, as does any resolution change. This can be a pain, as the initial loading of the game takes quite a bit of time. If you're running a muxless laptop set-up (almost every modern gaming laptop is muxless) with an AMD card, you'll have to run a third party hotfix alongside the game to get it running; needless to say, this feels like an oversight on Rockstar's end. Performance is okay, and options are pretty barebones (on the plus side, it gives you rough indicator in the options screen of what performance you can expect given the options you've selected). FoV is terrible and can't really be adjusted to an appropriate level. There are also the typical memory leak and CTD bugs that by now PC users have come to just begrudingly expect from any port.

It's fine, but disappointing for a product that was in development for so long.


So, what of GTA Online? If you're like me, you bought the game just for this. Much better progression system, personal avatar, no story nonsense, no milestone-gated content; this sounded pretty good to me.

GTA Online is engaging and there are moments of fun to be had, but there are so many horrific design decisions that I simply couldn't recommend it to anyone. The first thing to be said is that there's an element of pay to win here - you may purchase 'Shark Cards' from Rockstar using real currency, and these provide you with in-game money for buying cars and weapons. In-game money is hard to come by if you're just running missions, yet character ranks - which put the high end weaponry and vehicle upgrades behind a progression curve - aren't, which means player who purchase Shark Cards will have access to rocket launchers, sticky bombs, armored vehicles, heavy body armor, etc, while anyone who just wants to play the game they already sunk 50-70 dollars on will be stuck with the lighter weapons & unmodded vehicles.

You cannot hijack and keep super cars as a personal vehicle (you CAN just hijack them, certainly and the spawn rates seem reasonable - but you can't mod anything unless it's your personal vehicle, can't take anything expect a PV on missions, etc); you have to buy them with in-game currency. Again, this seems like a design decision intended to sell Shark Cards (the game even refers to super cars as 'premium vehicles').

Los Santos Airport in GTA Online is completely bereft of flyable vehicles. They simply don't spawn in. If you enjoy flying civilian prop planes or lear jets around, you're SoL until you scrape together enough cash to buy a personal hangar & plane (or, again, unless you're willng to pay for Shark Cards).


Compounding the above nonsense are two critical elements: the game makes no effort at all to segregate the player population according to rank & available money / assets, and the anti-griefing option in the game is simply pants-on-head stupid.

Putting griefers aside for the moment, the structure of each mission is often this: drive from A to B, with some exposition along the way to explain your objectives. Once you get to B, mission progression is triggered (often there is a shoot-out of some description, followed by a chase sequence of some description).

When you're playing missions with players who have fully upgraded and armored super cars - which is most of the time - you will not have much fun & will feel like you're dead weight. Upgraded super cars move at least two orders of magnitude faster than the fastest possible stock starting vehicle, handle as if they're magnetized to the road and are immune to small arms fire. On the plus side, hey, you'll get some mission money at the end anyway, even if your teammates have blown through the entire thing by the time you've got from point A to point B.

These problems are magnified with Heist and Set-Up jobs, which require everyone to get to the trigger locations before they progress. You will really feel like you're holding everyone back if you try to drive yourself, and you'll otherwise just feel like someone along for the ride if you take the 'better' option of jumping into a passenger seat of your teammates' super car.

It also makes the racing missions untenable - racing missions that you are required to win, by the way, to unlock the engine upgrades necessary to compete against players who already have them. >.<

So, now let's talk about griefing.

Griefing with this system is trivial. Low level players stand no chance against high level players, and once killed, you are spawn within 30~ seconds or so driving time from your killer (often without even having access to the road and thus hijackable vehicles. Not that it would matter anyway).

The implemented solution for this problem is 'passive mode' - enabling it makes you tranparent to other players, immune to weapons fire from them and immune to collisions with them (this comes at the cost of functionality on your end - you cannot access any weapons, even just to use them against NPCs. Passive mode is automatically disabled when you go on missions as a result, and is not re-enabled when you exit a mission - and because it's buried in the escape menu UI, you can often be killed before you have a chance to re-enable it).

While in passive mode, however, you're still vulnerable to NPC attacks, including incidental fire from police units attempting to engage griefers. A griefer in an armored vehicle - which are immune to police bullets & ramming damage - can abuse this by simply driving over to you and killing you with police fire over and over again.

This is reportable behavior, but sending a report will not fix a session where this is happening to you, and the report function is also buried in the damn escape UI. A decent griefer could easily kill you over and over before you can even access the menu to report them, and then leave the session once they get bored (you can only report players so long as they're in the current session, and Rockstar supports demands 'concrete proof' like video capture if you go to the trouble of sending an e-mail report).


It's a mess.