Recent reviews by The Wrayn Man

This game seems to have mixed reviews, but to me it's fantastic; better than Far Cry which has gotten progressively more boring since 2, this game is a breath of fresh air by comparison. No long drives, constant FPS gameplay with stealth and super consistent WorldBuilding. excellent open ended mission design, but still with a linear flow. This is a masterclass in how to make a modern single player shooter game. I'll be recommending it highly. (the ending was a little meh though)

In the 96 minutes I played this game I was able to nearly? complete the first 4 levels. I got stuck in a room in level 4. The game simply didn't entertain me enough in that time to make me want to reload from my save on level 3 in hopes i would play level 4 in "the correct way" and manage to get to the end.

It is, by a mile, one of the better solo-developer single player FPS games steam. it is, in fact, already better than the developer's last game, any other GG game available on steam, and half of the games bigfryTV has reviewed... but not by nearly enough. As it is, the early access version has made improvements from the beta, which I tested, but even at its current state, which is the best it has been, this is not a game I would consider "worth buying"

The problem doesn't come at the fault of the developer or their lack of skill or effort. It's clear that the amount of time, effort, and energy invested in this game FAR outclasses any other GameGuru game that has ever been made. The problem is, even at it's best, the GameGuru engine is not capable of producing an end product that (in today's gaming market) any normal gamer would be willing to pay for, or would feel like they had gotten their moneys worth.

The game itself has no stand-out features which make the gameplay loop super interesting. At best it's kind-of fun, at worst, you're combing the levels for random objects or missing trigger zones causing you to get stuck at level transitions. This is BY FAR not the worst game ever, (especially for someone who has a softspot for early 2000s jank fps games) but it's not something that I would ever feel good having spent nearly 10$ on, when I could have bought STALKER: clear sky for about the same money.

The developer loves to use gameguru, and i would never want to rob them of such joy, but when it comes to using a children's toy for commercial game development, one cannot expect to compete or be comparable in quality to other indie developer's offerings, even with all the "effort" in the world, and they are therefore setting themselves up to fail or be regarded negatively.

You cannot sell the cupcakes from your easy-bake oven for the same price as the ones that are made at a bakery, even a small bakery. (at least not if you want to feel like you're turning any sort of reasonable profit). Furthermore, you cannot use "well i'm using an easy bake oven" as the response when someone asks why the cupcake is so small, cold, and tastes so odd, especially not if you're trying to prove that someone can sell an easy-bake cupcake that competes with other cupcakes.

Is this a critique of gameguru? no. This is a critique of a skilled commercial game developer continuing to both rely on gameguru as a crutch, and use it to deflect all criticism related. I have no problem with someone making gameguru games, in fact, I look forward to playing them. I am disappointed that in this case, the first motive is clearly money. Were this game free, I would have compared it to other free games I had played, in which case it stacks up fantastically. It isn't though, it's 9$ which makes me compare it to games I've paid that much for, and when compared to chaser, e.y.e, and SIN episodes emergence, it's not playing in the same league.

Plenty of other gameguru devs make games of a similar quality, completely free, but this one, who is using the same assets I can buy, wants me to pay nearly 10 bucks for theirs. It's almost a little insulting.

Yes the core problem here is, even the best gameguru game ever made (which this DEFINITELY is) is simply not worth money today.

as far as gameguru games go, this game is a 9.3/10
as far as real games go, a 2.3/10.

I hope in one year when the final version comes out, I can change this review and say how wrong I was.

If you like Half Life 2, Half Life 2 mods, or single player first person shooters at all, pick this game up on sale. it looked great, ran perfectly, and never stopped being fun throughout the short campaign. it didn't overstay it's welcome and left me wanting more.

at 2 - 3 hours in length, It's not worth it's normal price, but if you see this game on sale for 2-3$, it's worth your time. It's an all around decent single player shooter, and I wish there was another episode!

It also came with the prior episode, but the graphics and gameplay of that one were a bit stodgy and oldschool for my tastes.

Gameguru is a rough-around-the edges, cheap, underpowered game engine. It is a spiritual successor to TGC's previos successful endeavor: FPS Creator. FPS creator was a dream come true for wanna-be mappers and newbie game designers wanting to create their own simple little first person experiences. It worked well enough for what it was, had a super active community, and lots of mods, an easy-to-learn custom scripting language, and many successful games were made with it.

FPS Creator reloaded promised to be the upgrade everyone wanted from FPS Creator. It was gonna feature all next gen graphical features, a bigger map editor, and in general more freedom and ability. This was proposed on kickstarter where it didn't meet it's exorbitant asking donation, so it later was rebranded and came out as GameGuru.

GameGuru DOES feature some nice modern features compared to FPSC, including DNS/PBR texturing support, better shaders/shader control, a bigger map editor, terrain editing, and LUA, which, while harder than FPSC's original language "FPI" is more powerful. It also can handle a lot more characters/polys/shadermapped objects onscreen before the frame rate takes a dive.

What GameGuru fails to do, is correct any of the problems that the upper level FPSC community wanted fixed, problems including:

a hard 2gb 32bit limit of memory allowed to be used to compile each level
a usage of more MB of ram per texture and lightmap than any other engine.

couple this with no level streaming or dynamic loading/unloading of data features (and memoryleak problems) and what's left is bleak. While a user might have more space available than before in FPS creator, they can't even use it, and if they manage to, the .exe they produce when its all said and done is very nearly broken, crashing at the drop of a hat, or running slow on computers that have no business running such a game slowly.

This is what stops GameGuru from being a very viable option for developing many type of games. It is basically a modern FPS Creator with no specific enhancements besides the game it can produce being geared for fans of bad 2008 games instead of decent 2001 games. The engine is not updated with any regularity, and updates focus on adding new features or doing odd tweaks instead of addressing the problem at hand.

If you're new to game design and want to learn the basics in an inviting map editor with simple controls and easy but limited features, I would hesitantly recommend gameguru as it satisfies all of those stipulations, but not as much as I would WHOLEHEARTEDLY recommend FPS Creator which is free and can produce a finished work of higher quality when compared to games produced around that engines time period, more easily.

If you are an FPSC fan who just found this and thinks it's gonna be everything they ever wanted FPSC to be; use The Source Engine.

If you are a talented lua coder looking for a sandbox with some decent free stock media, or looking to make a quick buck producing a terrible indie horror game/walking sim, then I would actually recommend gameguru... I am not one of those people though.

To be honest, I don't WANT to recommend this game, I will, mostly due to pride, but I really don't wanna. It's not worth the price tag, it's not that great. As a fellow FPSC developer, I loved the idea that a game made in my engine got some manner of "success" on steam. It's really funny, and really kitschy and indie, but that's about all this game has going for it. The graphics are bad in comparison to most other games (even most games in the price range), and the gameplay is nothing special besides a few semi-interesting puzzles. I recommend this only for those looking to see the technical limits of the FPSC engine in the "graphical" sense.

@the developer: You can be proud of squeezing so much out of such an underpowered rag, and creating a believable, well thought out tale, but when it comes to the artistic side of things (aesthetics of scenery, custom non-model pack media), or the actual "funness" of the game (number of moments where I'm smiling, unconcerned that I am playing a video game), it's nowhere near worth the price tag. Had this game been free, it would have been compared to all the other free games i've played, and I would've loved it, but being a 7$ game, It gets compared to other AWESOME games that I've payed 7$ for like chaser or E.Y.E. or Hover: Revolt of Gamers, thus shining a bad light on this game.

tl;dr: ok game, technically amazing for the game engine you used, but I would have preferred it to be free, even if it meant it was 1/4 the length. you could've definitely squeezed just as much humour and told the same story.

although completely devoid of any single player offering, this is an extremely fun well balanced game with something to offer everyone, most especially Ghost In The Shell Fans.

To be honest, I'm quite disappointed with this software, although it looks quite promising and it's nice that it's free, I only found out once I had downloaded the steam version, (then the adobe version just to see that there were not really that many more options to speak of) the AUTOBIPED script is worthless and simply doesn't work. I prefer autodesk character generater: although the character meshes, textures, and selection are not quite the quality that fuse offers (at least not free) they at least always auto-rig properly. also no alpha maps included with textures. minor annoyance. on the whole, would not recommend.

This game has the best damn cyberpunk aesthetic of any game ever. I've never felt more immersed in a world then i have in this game. I wish it was single player, however. I would pay good money for a campaign story game in this universe.