Recent reviews by Derpykat5

This game is so much fun.

If you enjoyed ULTRAKILL or Roboquest or other similar fast-paced PvE shooters, you're going to love this game. The character feels extremely mobile without feeling floaty or clunky once you get the hang of what actions block what other actions (pro tip for you; you can't kick while diving. It took me way too long to figure that out).

All the normal fluid-shooter controls are there; you've got shooting, running, you can double jump, slide, dive, even run on walls. Almost completely on demand bullet-time makes the combat feel so smooth without your dodging antics getting in the way of you hitting anything, and that's very good considering how the game works. You're completely immune to damage while stunting (the game's blanket term for wallrunning, diving, and sliding), so you'll be doing that a lot, but you're not exactly made of tissue paper either, and killing enemies restores health so you can easily pull yourself out of a bad spot.

In terms of weapons, you have no spare ammo on you. You pilfer your weapons from the dead (or living) bodies of your enemies and use them until the magazine runs out, then you optionally yeet the thing at the nearest enemy and trade it for a new one. In a really clever move, enemies have the ability to reload, but if you kill them after they fire a few shots, the gun they drop will have the respective amount of ammo missing from the mag - not that you need to strategize around that. There's plenty of guns for everyone, and even unarmed you have plenty of ways to attack.

Early in the campaign you get an arm cannon that can blast through walls. It's an effective combat tool, but it also creates new ways to approach scenarios; why bother finding your way through the area when you can just blast a hole in the wall? These kinds of opportunities ensure that the combat basically never stops, but also never holds you back as you find ways to ignore enemies and just sail right through the wall straight to your objective. Even if it's cheesy it feels just as satisfying to leave them in the dust.

There's a suitable enemy variety too, not only in the guns each enemy can wield but also in the different kinds of enemies. There's enemies with propeller jetpacks, enemies with lots of armor, and enemies that fire off an excessive amount of rockets (which you can kick back at them by the way).

Overall it's a pretty short package - the main campaign took me about two hours to beat on the standard difficulty (which is actually one higher than the game defaults to), but there's firefight modes (basically a kill-all mission where you're given a score based on your combat style) and randomly generated mini-campaigns as well as new game+. Overall it's plenty of content, especially given how fun it is.

If the name isn't familiar to you there's a good chance you never played many flash games when you were younger. This is a nostalgic classic of a platformer that I recently felt the desire to revisit. When I was younger I never beat the second one and only achieved a small fragment of completion on the first, and today I wanted to change that. With the death of flash (and the failure that is Kongregate's Ruffle integration) I was originally disappointed, thinking this core memory of mine would be lost to time. Then I saw a comment that both games had been ported to steam.

The premise is simple; you are a fox. You wander the world collecting mushrooms and keys to boxes that contain more mushrooms. That's only a side goal though; the main goal differs between games. In the first game, you need to head to the edge of the map while activating fast travel points along the way. One final boss later and you've completed the game. The second is even simpler; you have to find 25 collectible journal scraps and return to the start point.

What's so charming about this game is that there's no failure condition. It is a relaxing, enjoyable experience with no risk involved. The first game has enemies called "Darklings" that will eat the currency you need to activate the runestones, but it respawns infinitely and the Darklings can't hurt you directly - they don't even knock you around. The second game does away with Darklings altogether and just focuses on the exploration and platforming.

The movement feels fluid and nice. Navigating the environments is fun in both the somewhat linear first game and the more vertical second one. Finding the collectible items is a nice way to encourage exploration. There are hidden caves and tunnels all over the maps, which are invisible to you. In the first game they stay invisible, but in the second most of them are revealed when you cross the threshold. There are even secret caves within the secret caves!

It's no Hollow Knight, and definitely don't go in expecting hours of content, but if you've got an evening to kill, this is a great way to do it. The first game still holds up visually and the second one is just gorgeous.

A very enjoyable creature collector with an amazing soundtrack and awesome gameplay elements.

I don't think it's a hot take at this point that the more recent Pokemon games have been going downhill... riding on a quadrupedal bike-monster with stiff controls to unlock a gym battle that they'll sweep with one move. This has sent me on a bit of an alternative creature collector quest, and I found Cassette Beasts. Or, more accurately, my friends found it and recommended it to me.

Like other creature collectors, you wander around the world catching new creatures and building your team, leveling up and getting stronger as you go along. Unlike Pokemon though, this game does a lot of things to greatly enhance the strategy of play. First, it uses an AP system instead of PP. You gain 2 AP every turn and can store up to 5-10 depending on what creature you have deployed. Moves will use this AP, with stronger moves costing more. This not only prevents you from needing to run back to the healing center after every battle, but it also adds some strategy to the combat; do you use a weaker move now, or save up for a stronger one a turn or two from now? With moves that steal AP or alter the rate at which you gain it, your strategy can change mid-battle too.

The way the game handles type matchups is way better too. Certain elemental combinations generate special effects rather than just doing more damage. For example, hitting a fire type with a water attack will "extinguish" them, lowering their attack stats. Hitting an ice type with a fire move will "melt" them, changing them into a water type temporarily. Hitting a water type with an electric move will "conduct" them, causing them to take additional damage whenever any electric type move is used for a few turns. These elemental reactions do a lot to spice up combat strategies, and you may find yourself carrying around some off-type moves just to use for elemental reactions.

Speaking of moves, this game manages to one-up Pokemon there too. You can have up to 8 moves equipped depending on the strength of the monster. These moves are called "stickers" and they can be removed and swapped out to compatible monsters any time you're not in combat. There are also uncommon and rare versions of moves that have additional random effects added to them, like 15% extra damage, or a 22% chance to gain a free wall. There are also passive stickers and stickers that trigger automatically at the start of fights, allowing you to customize your monster loadouts beyond which four attacking/setup moves you'll pick.

The buff/debuff system is also fairly unique. Attack and defense buffs don't stack in effect and have a limited duration. The duration stacks though, so you can extend the buff longer. If the opposite effect is applied it subtracts some turns from the effect's duration, allowing you to cut down on the amount of time an enemy is buffed, or neutralize your own debuffs faster if you have the right moves.

But the leveling is where this game really takes the win. You yourself have a level. The stats of your monsters are determined by your own level (modified by the base stats of the monster form of course), and gaining exp "Stars up" your monster forms, making them learn new moves. Reach 5 stars and the monster can be "remastered" into a stronger form, but base forms are still somewhat viable even into the endgame. It's nice and refreshing to catch something cool and rare and actually be able to use it without grinding for exp for it.

And finally, you always have a companion fighting by your side. Most battles will be at least 2v2 (even versus wild monsters), with you and your companion able to support each other with a variety of moves.

As for the story, it's pretty neat. There are six companions, and each has a personal quest to complete, but there's also several other questlines you can pursue and of course the main story quest, which involves beating up scary bosses. Most companion quests have one of these bosses at the end, so there's always an incentive to do these sub-quests, though if you really don't want to, you don't technically have to (though you may struggle a bit finding the final boss).

Overall it's a really great game and if you're even remotely interested in creature collectors I would absolutely recommend giving this a try.

An enjoyable idle/incremental game. It's got a few sticking points, but the whole trip was engaging from start to finish.

Basically, you buy dimensions to generate antimatter (or lower tiered dimensions) and continuously power up via resets to reach 1.8e308 antimatter, then keep going through more reset tiers until you eventually beat the game.

The beginning is very slow, mainly because there's nothing you can really do to make it go faster (I.E. you can't click a ton to speed up progress or anything) and a couple of the mid to late game features are complex and difficult to optimize, but apart from that it was one of the better idle games I've ever played.

An enjoyable roguelike deckbuilder that puts you in the shoes of a secret agent doing secret agent things. Usually punching people in the face.

Fights in Tight Spaces is structured similarly to other roguelike games like Slay the Spire in that you have a "map" that is made up of scenarios that are a mix between fights, events, and shops. By navigating this map you eventually come up against a boss, then on to the next map. Unlike Slay the Spire however, the way each fight plays out is vastly different. Rather than just trading blows (or blocks, or skills, or whatever), you're on a grid-based map and movement is an integral part of the fight. Proper positioning will allow you to unleash devastating combos from relative safety, but if you do it wrong you can get boxed into a corner and overpowered. It's a basic flow; you do all your stuff, then all the enemies attack, then all the enemies move.

Manipulating the enemy AI is a fine art, and even if you aren't good at it you can still set up some pretty nice friendly fire scenarios with just a few basic cards. Pushing people out of the map instakills them, and it's very satisfying, but also a hazard to keep an eye out for since some enemies can push you, and the same rules apply.

But by far my favorite thing about this game is how forgiving it is. Not in an "incredibly easy" kind of way either. The game gives you ample access to the ability to "rollback" your turn (three times per fight on the default difficulty) if you make a bad play, and you can even start the fight over again (with the same card RNG). These forgiveness measures make each fight feel like a fun puzzle rather than a stressful scouring of your available options and all their outcomes. I can't tell you how many times I've lost a great Slay the Spire run to a stupid mistake, but if I do that here I can start over. In addition the game guarantees that you'll draw a movement card every turn if you have one available to draw, which means you can't ever get stuck due to bad RNG. I've also lost a ton of Slay the Spire runs to just not drawing enough block on turns when the enemy attacks, and while you still can draw insufficient movement to get out of any jam, you always have some options.

If you're worried that might make the game too easy, you can always just not use those options. You're under no obligation to rollback a turn or restart a failed fight, and if you're really up for it you can play on the higher difficulties where you get no do-overs and no RNG forgiveness.

After waiting for this for a while I finally gave it a try and the game falls into the pit of poor first impressions...

There are a couple of major pitfalls the game falls into really early that kills the enjoyment early on. First of all, the only reasonable way to remove terrain is with the black hole gun thing you get fairly early on, but it's extremely slow, can't dig down for whatever reason, and overheats extremely quickly. Even just getting to the first major story location took a few minutes of blasting through two steps of rock 4 seconds at a time (and it's only semi-auto too, so you constantly have to re-press).

Then there's the research cores. In order to use them for research they need to be placed, and they need to stay placed, which means you'll have this massive ugly pile of glowing research cores somewhere around your base. You can set up something that auto-places them, but that really doesn't help the massive eyesore it creates.

Then there's the near pitch-darkness you're trapped in. The flora does glow but it's very slight, and there are lightsticks but they only illuminate about two inches of space around where they are placed, so not very helpful.

Then there's the poor UI design, where you can press Shift (the same key that sprints) and a number to send that toolbar to the top, which the game never tells you about despite starting you with two toolbars so when you accidentally trigger it you have to hunt through the options menu trying to figure out what you did and how to access your toolbar again. To make matters worse the only way to stop holding anything (which is critical for clearing your screen of the placement preview hologram and just nice in general) is to hide the toolbar, which can also be done by re-selecting the hotbar slot you have selected, but hiding the toolbar makes it impossible to see what you've got in any given slot.

There's also some flaws this has over its peers, mainly that you can't just push the machines up against each other and have them transfer automatically like in Factorio; you need an inserter with every transition from machine to belt to machine to storage, which clutters up the setup with a lot of moving elements.

It's not exactly a bad game, but you can do better with others in the genre. Maybe these issues will be fixed as the early access progresses, who knows?

A truly fantastic party management RPG. There are tons of features for story lovers and tactical masters alike.

You'll start off a campaign with a motley crew of nobodies and over the course of the story they will level up, gain abilities, gear, and friends. The world expands with each chapter and fights become more dangerous.

You'll move your heroes around the world map, travelling from territory to territory and scouting them out. You can send all your heroes together or split them up to work on more things at once. While you work time passes and the enemy advances their plans, infesting more tiles and drawing more buff cards. Moving efficiently is important, but there's still time to be careful about everything. Take long enough and the enemy will bring the fight to you, spawning an incursion that you must intercept before it destroys your territory.

Once a territory is scouted you'll clear out the enemy forces in turn-based combat. The combat has a lot of interesting features that mix in with the strategy like weapon choices, flanking, and the wide array of abilities. Each of your heroes has an assigned class, with a sizable pool of abilities to pick between. You can have a frontline warrior with absurd amounts of armor, or keep them in the backline and buff the rest of your heroes. Your hunters can harry the enemy from afar with traps and tricks, or leap into the enemy lines under stealth to deal heavy damage. Mystics use the scenery to their advantage to either unleash powerful attacks or support your other heroes.

As the campaign progresses you'll encounter story scenes. There's some conversations to read and choices to make, but if you'd rather get back to the strategy you can skip straight to the decision at the push of a button, or rewind the scene if you want more context. Some decisions can transform your heroes or give them unique special abilities, which could change up their tactics greatly. A warrior might accept the blessing of the wolf god to gain flurries of attacks and a faster speed. A hunter might get marked by a Sylph, granting them the ability to shield their teammates. A mystic might even get the opportunity to buy a scorpion tail and move up into the frontlines, cleaving through enemies with poisoning stings empowered by interfusions. You'll always have the option to reject a transformation like this though, so if you prefer them to stay human it's always an option.

As each chapter ends, time passes. Your heroes will age and eventually retire, passing on knowledge to new recruits. Making sure you have a supply of fresh blood to take up the mantle of the retired is important, and easy.

Even failure isn't truly the end. Heroes that fall in combat have the opportunity to fall back and escape death, at the cost of becoming maimed. Under some circumstances, you may choose to have the hero sacrifice themselves instead, to ensure the survival of the others.

Overall this is a great game for people who are looking for a tactical combat game, and even better for those who want something story-driven.

A very challenging yet enjoyable roguelite. Enter the massive map, run around and kill stuff to loot gold and materials, die horribly to a stupid mistake and invest that gold into upgrades that increase your stats or unlock new features, like the ability to prevent the map from resetting.

There are six total areas in the game that scale up in difficulty as you go, both between areas (as more hazards and more dangerous enemies are introduced), as well as within the area (as the stats of enemies gradually rise the further you go from the entrance). All the areas link together and you can freely move between them, provided you're near a teleporter.

The enemies have a wide variety of attack patterns. Some try and deal contact damage, some shoot projectiles, some pretend to be chests. There's a decent smattering of them in every room, along with hazards like bouncing spike balls and exploding scrolls. Expect your fair share of spike traps as well, in three different flavors.

As you progress you gradually unlock classes, which have different HP and mana pools as well as unique weapons, talents, and passives. You can also find weapons and talents for "sale" during gameplay, which you swap with your current one to customize slightly.

In terms of in-run choices, there's the Relic system, where the more you pick up, the lower your Resolve gets, which lowers your health. The lighter (weaker) your equipment, the more resolve you have. Two-factor risk-reward.

The game also features 8 bosses (one for each of the 6 areas, a penultimate boss and final boss), with upgraded "prime" variants that are challenging and fun to fight.

If the game gets too hard for you, you can use House Rules to reduce enemy stats, turn off certain things like contact damage, or even make things harder if you really want.

Overall, the game provides a good mixture of difficulty, customization, and growth. Gets a little stale after NG+5 since everything scales linearly, which makes the upgrades lose a lot of oomph.

It's so... Meh. It's a full game and it seems fun, but it also seems way too easy. I annihilated my way through the first three missions without any kind of problem - I barely even got down to half health once. Maybe it gets harder over time, but it doesn't seem to pick up in difficulty much.

The gun crafting seems like a cool mechanic, but since it takes place over the course of a mission (and not between missions like I thought) you're constantly stopping the action flow to check every shop for more parts (of which many are not useful). You can make machinations of mass destruction, but by the time you've gotten there there's usually only 2 or 3 rooms left to actually utilize them in. No consistent boss fights either.

Movement feels sluggish (until you upgrade it), the jumps are a bit weak (although you get three airjumps by default), and there's no kind of dodge mechanic. The rooms are awfully cramped, which means every fight mostly devolves into strafing in circles while holding LMB and RMB at the enemies.

The energy mechanic feels almost inconsequential. I only ever ran out of energy once, and it recharges extremely fast a second or two after you stop firing. Keeping track of your energy and health is very difficult in the middle of the fight.

Which leads me nicely into the gameplay feedback. To put it simply; there's too much. Almost every projectile has a trail (yours and enemies), almost every pickup causes the edges of the screen to flash. almost every impact causes screenshake. It's incredibly difficult to tell when I'm taking damage and when I just picked up a coin, especially with weapons like the flamethrower, that fill your entire screen with a constant stream of flames.

And don't get me started on room clearing. You need to defeat every enemy in the room to move to the next one, but enemies make very little sound and many of them are fixed turrets, meaning you need to check every corner of the room for every last miniturret that will die in a single click.

Between-mission upgrades are fairly sparse too. Every time you fill the exp meter you get one upgrade point you can spend to increase one of your stats. Some upgrades lock another upgrade, but not all of them, and there is no indication which upgrades are "paired" like that. Fortunately, you can respec piecemeal at will, but it's still annoying. There's also a coin meter, but I'm not sure what it does when filled, or even if it can be filled, since it seems to reset each mission.

It's a decent time-killer if you like mindless destruction, but as far as challenging roguelites go, this one isn't it.

It's been several years and thousands of hours, but I can no longer support this game. I can no longer condone the business practices.

Content is regularly introduced with critical bugs that are never fixed, features are released in an incomplete and unbalanced state. Meanwhile, new stuff just keeps getting layered on, and further monetized.

Modron automation has been out for several years now. Background parties are still completely non-functional a vast majority of the time.

Trials have been out over a year now. You still can't get enough entry currency to sustain more than tier 2 (of 10), and you can still complete t10 if everyone clears day 1 (of 7). Legendaries are still on a 1-per-6-days timer or you're throwing your crafting materials away.

New adventure variants release consistently broken. Old adventure variants are still broken. The new shop has been "rolling out" to players for several months now. The latest champion was released without upgrades.

And what do they do? Do they reassign their programmers and designers to fix these critical issues? No. Just more stuff. And now they've got a paid battlepass with exclusive, paid-only, functional rewards. The devs are debating releasing these items later for gems, but the fact that they're only "considering" and are putting off the decision until the season pass ends bodes poorly.

I can no longer justify supporting this game. Whoever is in charge clearly doesn't care about making a quality product; they just care about siphoning money out of what is rapidly becoming a broken mess.

After about a year of absence I decided to come back and see what had changed... well, my hopes weren't high and I was right to keep them that way. They fixed the legendary crafting system so it's not timegated and you can actually spend scales as fast as you earn them without eating massive losses. They reworked trial scaling so now if you have dead weight you can't physically do it. Apart from that? Nothing. Paid battle pass rewards stayed paid. Still as buggy as ever. Background parties are still so consistently buggy they almost aren't worth using. Still a pile of microtransactions being shoved in your face constantly (there are more of them now too).

It honestly makes sense now that I think about it. They need to design a new champ once a month, two new story nodes and variants every two weeks, new seasons every three months, not to mention all the time they spend livestreaming. They've scheduled themselves to death and they don't even seem to realize it. At this point I'm mostly playing just to eat at their server bandwidth so they'll hopefully realize they need to change things up or lose money.