Recent reviews by agriba

It's the steam port of a very good board game. On principle, I'd say that's great because you don't have to deal with all the pieces and cards and such. It's the ideal format for a board game of higher complexity.

You know what's not ideal? These absolute brain dead developers who put these games on steam without full functionality. After a full year, they finally introduced a ranked mode, but it still doesn't have any sort of behavior controls.

Don't like how the game is going? Just leave. Literally no downside. Upset your losing? Just flip the metaphorical board over. Ranked only rewards the winner, you can make the stupidest decisions imaginable, drag as many people down with you, and face no reprocussions. Because last place is functionally no worse than any other place at this point.

I genuinley feel like the state of board game releases on steam is a scam. This, Terraforming Mars, Wingspan. It's just a bunch of schiesters cashing in on the good will of the original product to make a quick buck.

This is a collection of the first and second games in a three game series. The originals were on the Nintendo DS and now they've been ported to PC with a few extra features.

I'll get my critiques out of the way. What the game is missing are better sprites and better controls. It's the kind of thing you'd think they'd include with a remaster, but oh well. It does little to hurt my enjoyment.

Now the games themselves: 999 is a more visual novel than game. There are a grand total of 9 escape rooms you can puzzles through and some choose your own adventure stuff, but for the most part it's reading a story. And I'm here to tell you that the writing is great. I would read this if it came out as a novel instead of a game. It can be esoteric at times with the Vonnegut references and what not, but that adds to the charm. Genuinely one of my favorite games.

The sequel Virtue's Last Reward is far more gamey than it's predecessor. There are tons more puzzle rooms, choices, and puzzles by the way of how to progress. The story is bonkers. In some ways that's good, although for a mystery, I kind of threw my hands up and gave up trying to play along due to the sheer lunacy of trying to piece it all together. Despite that, it comes together in a satisfying way and there are some daring story choices that-- obtuse as they are-- are pretty darn exciting.

The only real demerit I'll warn you about is that the third and final game (didn't sell enough) is not a very good game and I wouldn't even recommend playing it. So be prepared to have some plot points left open. Luckily these games tell fully fleshed out stories in their own right so the franchise as a whole flopping doesn't fell that bad.

Oh well.

If you're up for playing something for a lot of reading, this is a must play. 8/10. I love these so much.

I don't think I've ever experienced such a shocking level of incompetence for on just the basic structure for designing a computer program. I have no idea how to play this game, in terms of mouse and keyboard inputs, and the absolute jackasses who made this game went out of the way to obscure that information.

Couldn't find any information by clicking around. Keys don't do anything. Pressing escape-- the UNIVERSAL key input for menu-- CLOSES THE GAME.

After some poking around, I was able to find a "How to Play" button on the main menu. This brings you to a screen that says, visit our website to find out. It LISTS the website. It doesn't provide a link, it lists-- IN TEXT-- a website to visit. A website I add, that you can't copy and paste. I wanted to return to the previous screen to see if there was anything else useful (not likely) but I could only accomplish this by closing out the program.

I'm going to quit talking before I start advocating for violence against these absolute buffoons. This is constructed on the level of an 80 year grand father trying to send you a website to visit by email by just sending you the key words he googled to find it.

Screw this game. Screw the people who DARED release it. I have never in my life been so vitriolically angry at someone releasing a game on steam, and that includes the overt scams.

The negative reaction to the DLC is frankly shocking. I don't normally review DLCs, but I am now because what the heck?

Brotato to me is all about the RNG min maxing of stats. So a dlc that adds in even more items and characters with weird quirks that make item and stat scaling more varied is interesting to me-- and kind of the point of a Dlc. Adding more items to the pool could dilute good upgrades or skew gameplay to a certain type (I've seen it in other games) but nope. It all feels the same, just with more choices.

There's a "map" and some new enemies. This is probably where expectations got muddled because map in this sense only means new wave spawns. There are a couple of new enemies, but it's mostly skins. And given the overall chaos this game develops into, it's often hard to even distinguish new enemy's from old. It becomes more noticeable on the higher levels where more precision is required, or if you're just bad at the game I guess? If you're over or under the difficulty curve, enemy attack patterns don't matter so much.

Overall, there's tons of design space that hasn't been touched on, but for a $4 DLC I'm not going to be expecting the next leap forward for Brotato. If you like the game, play this. If you don't like the base game or-- perhaps more relevant-- if you got tired of the base game, then this isn't going to do anything for you.

The Tomb Raider reboot is fun overall, but it's also a mixed bag. The environments are awesome with a unique verticality that gives the game a unique feel, but the quick time events are beyond atrocious. The animation and action set pieces are wonderful, but the combat is extremely easy and unimpactful (except when enemies surround you and you instantly die, then it's annoying).

This would be a long review if we went into depth on the pluses and minuses. Ultimately I would simply describe this as a very good game that was shipped out six months too early. If you smoothed out the player movement and made it a bit more crisper without any janky/glitchy object collision, if you had a more solid vision if it was a dangerous game focusing on stealth and smarts or a run and gun power fantasy.

Room for improvement, to a greater degree than what I've described here. But hey, there's two sequels and I'm excited to see how it transforms.

6/10

I suspect from the release year that this is one of those awful gimmicks from Youtube's dark era-- the Let's Play. It's barely a game. Just something intentionally frustrating and bad so little kids can laugh when an adult pretends that they are also five.

If you want a serious evaluation, it's like a rigged claw game. The actual mechanics aren't so complicated controlling a hand, but everything is slippery and even when you figure out how to operate all five fingers at once, nothing acts like it should.

Literally no value 0/10

Both the fact that the general reaction is positive and the fact that this came out after Dishonored are shocking to me.

I had vaguely recalled seeing some footage and assumed going in this was going to be a super solid stealth game from the early 2000's. In reality it's a very clunky stealth game from 2014. Most mechanics, sight/sound/ combat. Everything is poorly communicated and implemented with an extreme amount of gaminess.

What do I mean? You can be in a high visible area that's 'dark' and not be seen from three feet away. The guard can clearly see me. . . except he can't. Except those times where the game decides that he can. It's impossible to have any intuition with the way information is presented.

I liked the world and main character I guess?

Honestly if you're not functioning on nostalgia, I don't think it's appealing.

All I knew going in was that this game was a critical darling. It's has acting, it's about a serious topic cool, but what is it? In reality Hellblade is a bigger budget steam indie game. It's a walking simulator with some combat and puzzle sections thrown in to call it a game.

I'll start with the recommendation. Yes since I got it for $10. There are interesting ideas here and when it works when it works, but from here on this is going to be extremely critical because the chorus of glowing reviews is somewhat baffling.

GAME PLAY:

There are 'puzzle' sections, combat sections, and walking around.

I gave puzzles air quotes for good reason. They really aren't. The core mechanic is looking at stuff and the game doesn't just hold your hand, it forces you on a linear path where you go to a place, look in a particular direction, to advance the level. Player choice isn't involved, there is no difficulty or even ability to make the wrong choice. It's some cool visuals masquerading as game play.

Combat. Straight. Up. Sucks. Don't get me wrong, there are moments where you are flowing around the battlefield and the lack of hud and only intuitive feed back feels great. Panic sets in as your character physically gets weaker and slower as they get hit. But that's maybe 5% of the time. It's simple, stale, and redundant. Sometimes, frustrating, and some of the systems that earn it points just don't work like they should.

Walking. This is really what you're playing the game for. Walking through Norse environments. While the start of the game felt like stock assets, as things progress it picks up. To the point there was one small level that was phenomenal. Do you want to explore ancient Norse mythology? Well here you go.

Special commendation goes to maybe an hour in the middle game where there was literal game play. For a brief and shining moment, things came together and it felt like I was playing a real game. There was stealth, and almost puzzles, and running away from monsters. Turn that into a game.

STORY

For something billed as so narrative driven, the ability to tell a story is somewhat lacking. The core elements are there. Senua goes to Hel to rescue the soul of her dead love. And she has Schizophrenia, which is the best part. But these elements are never developed past the original introduction until the end where there are a few kinks. Honestly, 90% of this game is retelling the audience information they already know in slightly different ways. And not just slightly different but problematically vague.

Every time people-- critics especially-- jump on the band wagon on one of these arty farty games and call it art, it pushes the medium as an artform back. If you took the writing here and put it in a book, it would be mercilessly torn to shreds as amateur, slow, and repetitive.

10/10 set up. Like 3/10 execution.

MARKETING

Weird thing to talk about, but I'm poking around now and I'm realizing there's a bit of trickery involved. IGN gave it a 9/10, whatever IGN is a joke that's too scared to rate a game lower what they feel like they are expect too. But then Hellblade has won all of these awards, so what's up with that?

The Game Award for Acting, for Sound, for. . . Impact???

Fairplay, the sound design is nearly perfect. But yeah, what other game has acting like this? Not a lot in a given year. Impact is literal fluff.

I think what we have is a public perception generated through marketing campaigns and trickery. You take 10 of the 1000 ratings from journalists who gave it a good score. You plaster awards all over for things that really don't speak to the quality of the product. Boom, you have. . . art.

IN SUMMARY

For $10, I think it's worth the price of admission, but you will be frustrated by both what's here and isn't. More than anything, Hellblade is a monument to the lack of ambition and ideas that can come when making a game. Voice in your head? Integrate that in a meaningful way rather than recording ten voice lines that play throughout the game. Game play, yeah, maybe include it in your 'story driven game'. Story? Find actual writers if its a STORY GAME. It's fine if they come from the video game industry, but maybe hold them to the same standard as every other medium.

Check it out if you want, or don't. It's extremely borderline when on sale.

Celeste is one of the best platformers there is, period. It starts off simple enough to make you say, is this is? Only to build and build into pure pandamonium. The learning curve is perfect and the game makes the right choice to keep the basic mechanics simple. Each level has a new type of obstacle that interacts with your basic jumps, dashes, and climbs that forces you to use adapt and learn.

Visually and audio, perfect. The sprite work once again seems simple at first but as you get to later levels, the artistry gets severely impressive.

Now a bone to pick. On it's own its a 9/10 game. But I ran into extreme, capital E, technical issues. The game would crash every thirty minutes or so with at least seven different crash reasons. Redownloading and verifying did squat. It got to the point where I couldn't finish the endgame content because the game would crash before reaching a check point.

Honestly any other game, this would have been a dealbreaker.

The fourth mainline entry into the Borderlands series (there was a 1.5 released after 2, stick with me) is the most generic of the lot. It's genericide for sure. All the bumps have been sanded down to make this a highly produced snooze fest. There are a small number of things better and a large number of things atrocious about the experience, but the sum total is just. . . so boring.

Let's start with the good. The game loves it's gun and this one advertised it. You know what? The guns were in fact cool. There was a ton of variety and I was genuinely surprised at times. It doesn't materially affect the experience outside of some moments of discovery, but I was impressed.

. . . And that's it. Let's jump into the medium. The general gunplay is a little tighter, but functionally the same. The world maps are supposed to be huge and varied, and that's more of a marketing gimmick more than anything.

You leave Pandora in this game, but the style feels similar. There is nothing that feels new. The giant city level which is first SHOULD feel completely new but it lacks the polish and level of detail to really bring it together. Tons of assets from Pandora are recycled, many of the enemies (due to some plot contrivance they thought would bring it together) are recycled. If you include the previous game DLC's, this could have been Pandora or the moon.

Repaint lockers and trash, why are there lockers trash in a technological metroplis. You can have bandits roving the universe, but maybe they dress different in each region and maybe even act differentlY? You can't brag about how large and vast the exploration is if you've only gone half way. Lay off the copy and paste.

And the size. It's immaterial. What's the difference between a bunch of small regions you can freely move between versus one larger one? Dunno. The "epic" level design didn't change my experience one iota.

Now the garbage. The real garbage. The Writing:

Let's take a step back. The Borderlands games have their host of dissidents who find the writing annoying or grating. That's fine, but what I think this game is done is retroactively make people hate the previous games' tone. This game's writing is so abhorrently atrocious that I can't even blame you if gaslights you into thinking this was always borderlands. I can't stress this enough, I don't know who wrote this thinking it was acceptable, I don't know who edited, recorded approved. This IS one of the worst written games of all time. Not in a Tommy Wisseau-- The Room-- way, but in a never ending screaming way. You've made a bad joke, that's fine, but maybe don't have the voice actors scream that bad joke at me for the next two minutes, so long that it connects to the next bad joke creating a never ending cycle of absolute garbage.

I want to die.

If you already own this game, it's worth putting some hours into, but I would NEVER seek this out. Go play Borderlands 2 or the PreSequel.