Recent reviews by xs2007

Having played through Haydee 1 (H1) and more or less it's entire Steam Workshop after roughly 300 hours, as well as Haydee 2 (H2), it was a natural choice to buy Haydee 3 (H3) right away.
H3 is very close to H2 in terms of tech (engine, etc.), it really feels like a completed version of H2. Some new mechanics were added, some removed (but are still likely available for mod maps). The map is new, though. I finished the main game in roughly 20 hours, but I didn't make haste and was stuck a couple of times.

What I really like is how the story actually tries to explain a lot of the map, even the tutorial rooms, the relation to H2 and even why the main character looks like she does. Also finally an actual boss fight!

If you liked H1 or H2, go buy H3 as well. For me, H2 will be the weird outlier and H3 will likely become my new go-to puzzle platformer, surpassing H1 in that regard. Probably gonna explore the editor, once I finished hardcore and all the achievements.

Played xx hours of the Prologue / Demo already.
Very nice and addicting gameplay.
At only 4 bucks, I highly recommend it.

Also, sava data from the Prologue carries over.

Kinda addicting, would recommend. Will buy the full game. :)

Less frustrating than web development.

Succubus is a level-based linear fast-paced action game, and - so I've heared - has a lot of Doom vibes. (I didn't Play Doom myself)
The game overall is well done, however, there are still some bugs here and there. Some minor, like missing translations, "new" indicators not disappearing, but a few times, I had to reaload checkpoints, because something was stuck. This was not often and I'm sure the devs will fix these over time. Also the game is a HUGE improvement over Agony, in case you have played it.

The game is set in hell and is definitely not for the faint of heart, at least with the uncensor DLC (which you can get on the website, if the DLC is banned in your country, like e.g. it is in Germany). Expect a lot of blood, gore, sexual content, torture, etc. you get it. You play as Vydija, a dominant succubus, striving to regain her place in hell. You can customize her in terms of horns, armor, skin color, bodypaint, hairstyle, and more, while you progress through the game and unlock this kind of content as well as weapons. Vydija's english voiceover sounds a bit like she is 60+ in age, a younger, but rough voice might have been a better choice.

For overall playtime, it took me 24 hours to 100% the game with the main story done, all sidequests and all achivements.
I think they missed out on some potential (so far), as you can set the difficulty level, but the game does not record your playthrough time (except during the run for specific sidequests), max. difficulty level, damage received, etc. in the end. Also I'd love to see level rating results and achivements and/or goodies for clearing the game in the harder difficulties. No singleplayer incentives for repeated play here.

The game has a leaderboard mode, but I'm not that much into competition against others in these kind of games. Some of the leaderboard scores did look cheated as well, or I just suck, idk :D

Overall, the game is really well done. If the combination of a dominant female (anti-)heroine, fast-paced action, blood/gore and the hell-theme is up your alley and/or you're generally a fan of the hedonistic lifestyle, you can't do anything wrong here. Get the game, while it's hot. :)

Dreadout 2 is a horror game, that is set in Indonesia (where the game devs are from) and features a lot of what I assume to be Indonesian folklore.
Overall, the devs put quite some work into this game. It shows in a lot of places.
The world and characters are well done and a lot of things are very detailed.
The "normal" parts of the game give a good insight on the way people are living in Indonesia (again, I guess, I've never been there).
Also the horror elements are very well done and immersive, like looking away from something for a moment and then wondering if it was like this a moment ago (spoiler: it was not).

I like the story and I really recommend to play DreadOut 1 before playing this, as the stories are quite intertwined and DreadOut 2 really is a sequel. Though I think, some things could be explained a bit more in detail, like what's behind "Dark Linda", the eggs at the old ladys house in the mountains, Linda's parents and so on. Maybe I just didn't get it, but still, it would be nice to have it presented in a more clear way.

Unfortunately, quite some things are edgy, that add a bitter taste to this otherwise very well done game.
It's just a shame, but might be fixed by patches in the future. The version of the game I've played is/was 1.1.1.
First, the prologue boss fight is absurdely hard. In my opinion way harder than any other fight in the game . Do not let it discourage you! The rest of the game is very worth to be played!
Hint: If you can't seem to beat it, set "Effects Quality" to "low" in the options. This is another point, setting a graphics quality to a lower setting should never influence the games difficulty, but it does.
In some situations enemies should show more clearly when they are hit.
Some fights seem a bit unfair to me, like the battle against the friendly hair lady ghost from your home .
I also falsely thought to have encountered a game breaking bug in the later parts of act 6 due to the way the game reacted on my input (not at all), when I could not use the key to obtain the fourth egg in Siskas basement. The game should tell me, that the suspicious key is not working and not just do nothing upon interaction.
Also, after finishing the game there is no way to go back to the town and e.g. finish urban legends and the Ghostpedia. You cannot even start the game in a certain act, just from the very beginning, come on.

Still, the game entertained me for about 10 hours, and despite the negative things I addressed here, it still is a good and solid game! Should you buy it? Yes, you should!

I've been a big fan of Wings of Vi from the very beginning and was pretty much hyped about this game.
Now this weekend I was finally able to play it. Also receiving mixed reviews so far, I feel more than obliged to write a detailed review on Roah.

Roah is a platformer, featuring a thic arachnid-scorpio-kind female protagonist and comes with a combo-heavy fighting system.
As far as I remember it is based on the Unity engine. The input/control is well done and it features beautiful 2D art.
As for the combos, I think at times they are rather difficult to execute with the right timing, but this may get better with the game's learning curve.

Roah is not as hard as Wings of Vi and I managed to hit ~36% completion in about 4 hours on medium difficulty.
However, the game does get significantly harder in the areas I'm exploring right now.
But compared to Wings of Vi, which I wasn't even able to finish on angel (easy) mode, Roah appears much more doable, while still being pretty hard.

The game does have some minor control and clipping issues as of the time I'm writing this review, but it's only been released 3 days ago. Today there even were at least two patches. I did not encounter any game breaking problems so far, so I guess these problems will be evened out in some weeks. And finally, native high resolution :)

Only real criticism on my part is the story, which seems rather thin up until now.
But still, I've only seen a third of the game so far, so let's see.

So, to summarize:

+ challenging, but not insanely hard
+ unique character
+ combo-heavy fighting
+ hot characters (if you are into thic girls)
+ beautiful artwork

- sometimes hard to do combo inputs with correct timing
- minor bugs 3 days after release
- story is rather thin so far

Overall, I really do recommend Roah, I've had a pretty fun time playing it so far, so give it a shot!

The original, running on Windows 10.
As awesome as it was in my childhood.
In case you didn't play it back then, try it now.

From the gameplay point of view it's incredible and set the standard of theme park simulations for years.
Every Visitor has needs and personality traits, rollercoasters may be created without blueprint from scratch, immense coloring of everything in the park, accidents, ratings, marketing campaigns, a lot of decoration items and the list can go on further and further.

From a technical point of view this game is more advanced than games that came out 10 years later.
It features live views in windows, physics engine and acceleration computation and massive parallel visitor simulation of up to 5000 entities.
And its written almost entirely in x86 ASM. If you don't know what this means, trust me, as a programmer, when I say: This is amazing.

So yeah, this game sat in my library for almost two years now, because a friend needed a fourth player for the 4-pack. I put this game off as weird sci-fi Terraria clone (like all the bad Minecraft clones, that popped up), but oh my, how wrong I was. This game is awesome!

Starbound is in a way similar to Stardew Valley, in regards to the spectrum of possibilities to do. Sure, there is a main storyline (which I haven't completed even halfway yet), but you can do so much besides that. Like build a crew, build a mech robot, explore local civilizations on planets, obviously stock up your gear, decorate stuff, scan stuff, grow crops and whatnot.

This alone does not make the game unique, but what does is the incredible amount of love and detail everything is implemented with. For example there are seven playable races and every time you scan something a unique text bubble appears over the head of the character, that differs from race to race. And there is a metric ton to scan, it must have taken ages to write all this. Another example is an air hockey table I highjacked somewhere and brought to my ship. Two of my crewmembers actually started playing airhocky with it (despite that the airhocky table item only stated "decorative"). The list goes on.

Every time I found a new feature of the game, I'd expect it to be in a certain level of detail (experience from 20+ years gaming) and I was surprised everytime, that it's far beyond that.

As I don't want to go into too much detail/spoiler, go get this game for yourself, it's awesome, and at just 14€ a no-brainer.

Cute and cool blend of Minecraft and Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley.

I've not seen much so far, but looks like it has a lot of potential.

If you liked either of the above mentioned games/series, give it a try!