Recent reviews by K-PUNK

incredible world with beautiful visuals and a captivating soundscape. the gameplay works on many levels. melee combat leaves a bit to be desired and when I played before the new difficulty setting I found it far too easy, but magic was great and gave a lot of options. I just loved to explore the world, how alien it felt, and yet how satisfying it was to just break into some dudes house for a quest. The simplicity of a lot of the quests and the actions you take is the largest contributing factor to the Morrowind comparison I have stuck in my head, even though the fungal alien aesthetic is right there. GOTY 2024

The best tcg on on the market and a huge breath of fresh air, elegantly and uniquely designed mechanics with excellent artwork and animations that bring the game to life. brings back the feeling of Hearthstone's golden age. thank you bred bone.

In a word: Triumphant.

One of the best games to release in years, possibly the best.

It all comes together like coffee and cream. The art style, the level design, the music, the cutscenes, the gameplay.

Dear god the gameplay. Everything I want in a shooter like this. You can melee and you can shoot and you can use the environment. Bullets are scarce, weapons break - you have to use everything at your disposal, and it is all a joy.

The levels are huge and multilayered, there are so many ways to approach an objective. Not in some faux 'fight sneak or talk' fashion, whatever route you take feels natural, you don't have to contort yourself one way or the other, the game simply invites you to approach it in the manner which feels natural. I have a lot of fun going one way and think 'Wow, what a cool path that is, I bet it's the fun alt path' and then I die and reload, and just happen to end up going another way. There is no such thing as a 'main path' or 'alt path' in Fallen Aces; there is simply the level, and its objective and you must find a way forward. Whatever way.

The comic book style cutscenes are a joy to behold, they grab you by the collar and they scream 'PRODUCTION VALUE' despite this game's low budget. The voice acting from River Kanoff, Kamran Nikhad, Marissa Lenti and the others cannot be divorced from the panels that make up these cinematic's visuals. They're a married couple, and they have been for 20 years and going strong.

The ONLY criticism ('criticism') I have, is that I feel it could do with a harder difficulty setting, hard is pretty well balanced, but I'd personally appreciate it being toned up just a tiny bit, as I find consequence so important in this type of game, and don't seem to be finding myself dying a whole lot. It's minor and very personalised, but it'd be wonderful to see.

I haven't even finished the first episode and I'm already mourning, knowing it will end and dreaming of the next episode's drop. For now I will drink this game in. I want to become one with it, it is that good. I have never smiled so much playing a video game, a big, dumbass grin from ear to ear for my 3 hours playtime. I only stopped to make this review, and now I will go back to it.

Really fun, a lot of depth to tactics and execution in game and I for one really like the character progression. Matchmaking isn't as bad as people suggest, I've not faced anyone with above 50 in any stat yet and in my opinion it makes sense that an up and coming player would have to overcome better players in order to improve. I seriously recommend it.

really fun, a bit bare bones for a roguelike but the core mechanics are fantastic. I love team building and the match mechanics are pretty good at allowing you to play creatively with regard to your approach to tactics, depending on artefacts and skills you might want to play a lot of short passes; maybe have a fast winger who can set up and draw defenders away from your slow centre with a powerful slap shot. Or maybe you're just gonna load everyone with extra sticks and ensure that the opposition is on the ground the entire match. Absolutely worth the price of admission even if it were to stop development right now.

No

God what a chore. The game does interesting things with weapon scarcity, it's an interesting angle that does well to put you into the position of Ethan, a cop on the run fighting for survival amongst the dregs of society. But it's built on sand, you'd think this kind of mechanic would pair well with a creative combat system that demands anything at all of the player but it just doesn't. The combat is built on an incredibly stiff and kinda aimless melee system with parries that often don't work, and enemies who can feint while you seemingly cannot (could be wrong on this). It's a shame because I do like the weapon system, I like the feeling of finding a gun and knowing I have the advantage in the next fight; I like pulling pipes off of walls to use as weaponry, but again it all amounts to nothing. The combat is incredibly frustrating with little satisfaction and there's nothing else interesting in the game. The story is wildly uninteresting, the environments are uninspired and difficult to negotiate because of the harebrained player movement and limited sprint. It doesn't help either that you need to ignore a vital mechanic - the taser - in order to have any fun, as it's incredibly overpowered trivialising any combat encounter at the press of a button, and for some reason is tied to a very short timer rather than ammo. Possibly the most tedious thing about this game is how often it interrupts you to perform 'investigations' which involve pressing a button when your screen flashes to bring up the required tool (which the game selects for you) then just looking around until you see a highlighted footprint or splotch or map you need to take a picture of/scan. You are then forced to listen to the lab assistant prattle about the relevance of whatever clue you found, thus interrupting the already weak gameplay with an utterly yawning story. On top of all this, the game is very difficult to play in a reasonable state, not itself unreasonable considering the game's age, but the only fix for massive swaths of the soundscape being missing is downloading two multi gigabyte patches from media fire, and it's not worth it for this game!

IF you're for some reason interested in the atmosphere or just like the idea of the combat, it might be worth picking up to play around with for an hour or so (though be warned the game takes a while to let you start playing). Ultimately, however, this game just made me wish I was playing Dark Messiah, which is what I was alluding to when I said this game could use a combat system with any amount of creativity. It's a game about frantic, dirty fights for survival in alleys and subways, yet it doesn't even allow you to kick a guy onto the tracks. What a chore.

Tentative recommendation on this one. It's trying to a lot of the things Fortune's Run is doing with melee + gun combat, open ended levels, 'player freedom and rpg mechanics' etc. added on top of a fast paced fps. However the combat is incredibly imprecise, parrying feels awful, the timing is not difficult but the parry window is longer than the animation suggests, sometimes it will be long enough to parry all bullets in a salvo and sometimes the last one will hit you. The weapons don't really have much impact, the pistol is like hilariously silly and even the better weapons which do a reasonable amount of damage and sound good feel lacking because it's as if you aren't even hitting the enemies, they just die by themselves, it's hard to describe but the combat is simply lacking a very important tactile element. The encounters are also very weak, the idea of this being an actual world is thrown out the window as you repeatedly enter arenas to have a million guys teleported on top of you with minimal thought into their combinations, that all have very basic designs and die by one slice of the sword, the combat, as well as being imprecise, is somewhat mindless. And there just isn't much room for player freedom or creativity despite what the tutorial character suggests.

Ultimately I like the idea for this project and it is early access but it needs a helluva lotta work.

i hate ilban so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ much. if he has the first turn you can guarantee that he will play the single most annoying move on the board. impressive AI in that regard

"I'm too tired to keep on pretending like I don't care"
I really loved the original Max Payne, it's arcade elegance mixed with just enough depth to allow you to pull off some really satisfying and cool manoeuvres and on higher difficulties it demands those manoeuvres of you. But the really compelling thing about Max Payne is it's writing, Sam Lake is fantastic at somewhat campy but entirely sincere writing. Writing which can, on its face, feel trite and undeserving of its reputation, but nonetheless is spectacular when actually experienced; he's sort of the Stephen King of video game writing if Stephen King was as good as people say he is.

Enough talking around this game, I bring this all up because El Paso Elsewhere does not just replicate the gameplay of Max Payne but embodies the virtues of Sam Lake's writing style without owing itself entirely to Remedy's games. It is a very singular experience, it is deeply moving, personal, sincere and of course very campy. You feel it from the very start, the protagonist James Savage's monologues are very overindulgent in the best of ways. Flowery in the direction of pulp, all of Max Payne's talk about angels and demons and the night sky are paid homage to in every line, fitting for a game featuring 'biblically accurate' angels, vampires and eternal night. It's fun and lovely to listen to and spices up the game as you go through the arcade style levels all made up of the same assets. At first, the story does just seem like a piece of pulp fiction, like a noir serial that needs to tell its story and end within a restrictive word count. A man's ex - who IS a vampire - is trying to end the world and he has to stop her, classic!

But then the tone shifts, I couldn't tell you where exactly but at some nebulous point it does, you feel it happen but in hindsight the exact moment is foggy, like a reverse wave function collapse.

I don't want to go into detail on what this story is about, but it is clearly a very personal expression of Director Xalavier Nelson, and he has an extreme clarity of vision, it is truly resonant. I can see him in James, and I can see myself, and many other people in him. I really didn't go into this came, expecting to review the story as 'deeply moving' - though that is a phrase I use a LOT - yet here we are.

It's carried too by the incredible vocal performances of Nelson and Emme Montgomery. I want to draw attention to Nelson in particular because not only does he pull off a fantastic performance as James - nailing the gravelly, defeated tone of a noir protagonist, coupled with a few snappy quips and humanising moments of shock - but the man has pipes. Every few levels, the soundtrack has lyrics, these songs are very indulgent synthy hip-hop which for some reason reminded me of CSH's Making a Door Less Open , they're very cheesy but really fun and all serve to make their respective levels feel narratively significant; they really get the blood pumping too. Which is not to diminish the excellent OST of the rest of the levels, one of my favourite soundtracks, ever, probably.

The gameplay is satisfying but drags a bit in the middle, once you get to the back end of the game and the difficulty picks up, as the game becomes meaner and more strategic with it's enemy placement, it picks up; however once the novelty wears off and before this spike in difficulty (though this is never a difficult game) it does become a bit samey. I don't understand the inclusion of the slow-mo dive other than that it was in Max Payne. Enemies don't shoot bullets so you don't really have any reason to dive aside from a few encounters with projectile firing angels and brides. However again it is only in the later levels these enemies demand you to use this ability and, even then, very sparingly, it was cool when I needed it but it was really just a sparsely used get-out-of-jail-free card.

There is a great variety in the weapons, they all feel good and have their uses, all throughout the game, and while ammo isn't scarce you cannot just use one weapon because ammo is plentiful in its variety, you don't get a tonne of ammo for one gun, but a lot across all guns, this is great.

This rings true for the enemy variety as well, there are many enemies that are all interesting (though I found the armoured knights to be a bit silly since you don't need to hit their weak points if you have a shotgun). But the game doesn't utilise them properly - which is to say, in thoughtful combinations - until the latter half. Also I hate those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ werewolves, like straight up.

Overall, this is a fantastic game and I loved my time with it, it will be VERY hard to forget.