At first this felt like an immediate five stars. After the first hours the game dropped the ball. It's a fresh take on twin-stick shooting, but the enemies are almost all the same and the challenges are unevenly paced. Still, it's a fun little game for a while. Pros + Solid top-down 2D action with many weapons + Aiming not mandatory + Mow down hordes of enemies + Super large maps. You can keep running to any direction + Enemies spawn just outside your visual range. Action never stops even if you outran that one killer mob + Two maps change this a bit, being narrow vertically or horizontally + So many upgrades! Both in-run and long-term ones + Long-term upgrades can be changed any time between missions + Lots of challenges. E.g. beat a certain level with a certain character, or without moving, or without taking damage, or with a certain upgrade path maxed + Easy to pick up and put down. Good for short casual sessions Neutral = Missions are time-based. Every minute starts a new "wave", meaning the infinitely spawned enemies will be stronger. Your upgrade speed depends on kill speed. A fresh take, but creates problems with pacing Cons - Most enemies feel like one and the same - Only six levels, and they feel very similar to each other - Most tension was lost after early game. Most runs got either too easy or very hard depending on early upgrades - The enemy spawn system means early upgrades have an outsized effect on runs. Higher damage = faster XP gain = faster upgrade gain - Fixed 10+min run length leads to tedious challenges. Runs can be mind-numbingly easy, but final boss challenging. Fail? Don't want to retry - Some background art, obstacles and enemies look too similar. This can cost you no-hit challenge runs - Some weapons (esp. Toxic Cloud), make it even harder to see near yourself Better pacing, enemy and level design would make this a classic. It's still decent fun for occasional short sessions, but starts quickly to feel like mowing the lawn.
Dysmantle has a great early game and lots of potential. Unfortunately most new content after that is separated between hours of grind. This amount of content should take half this long to play through; then I'd buy DLCs for more. Pros + A mostly relaxing atmosphere + Lots to explore + Interesting early game + Nice cutscenes + Many good core mechanics and puzzles Neutral = Bosses are fun but easy = Tower defence quests are fun but too hard. I had to complete most of the game to beat even the first one, which you find early on = Most issues seem easy to fix. But many are already two years old (see philkingz's review, which I found to still be mostly spot on) Cons - Gets way too repetitive from mid-game onwards - Running back and forth to carry resources to unlock a new area/shortcut is tedious, and takes hours in total - You can't complete a late-game mission without hours of boring farming. Even half that long is too much - Weapon/tool switching has a janky delay - Loot pickup has a janky delay - Leveling up becomes meaningless around mid-game. This is especially bad due to the grindiness. All that work should be rewarding - Lack of direction, Part 1: I missed major features of the game, like the ability to build a home base and teleport there, until completing most of the game. Simple early quests to find these would have made the game much more enjoyable - Part 2: There should be more side quests to showcase different upgrades' mechanics. The player shouldn't have to guess which are worth the investment - especially due to how grindy this already is - Part 3: Many quests lack area indicators - Some upgrades are OP, esp. knockback and stun (e.g. sledgehammer) - You can stunlock many bosses (e.g. Alpha Dog, Vicious Slasher, Vicious Twins) Dysmantle feels like it should still be in Early Access.. It's about 80% ready. The base is good, but only the early game felt right; the rest needs balancing. This could be 5/5 instead of 3/5. A decent timesink at discount.
Disclaimer: I used to play a ton, but nowadays I'm a more casual gamer and quality of life matters to me more than it used to. PROs: Hollow Knight is a masterpiece in so many ways. Rarely has a game's atmosphere so captivated me, or the feeling of exploration been so real and wonderful. Almost everything about the game is such a polished masterpiece, feeling amazingly unique among the hundreds or thousands of games I've tried. CONs: What got me to abandon the game was something absolutely ludicrous: checkpoints are far from boss fights. When you lose to a boss, you have to re-travel through up to a dozen screens full of enemies, battling and dodging through them in a desperate attempt to avoid losing any hitpoints before getting your next shot at the boss. This is the opposite of fun and felt like a colossal waste of time to me. There are a few smaller QoL issues in the game, like having to spend one of your limited equipment slots if you want to be able to see where you are on the map, and losing all of your money every time you die in a hard-to-reach place (your ghost keeps it until your next death, but getting there could be deadly, and if you manage, your ghost might kill you). Everything else about this game is an absolute masterpiece and kept me playing for hours despite the frustrations, but somewhere around the midway through the game I noticed I had spent more than half the time of the last few hours re-fighting the same waves of enemies to re-reach the easiest remaining boss. I'd rather watch a movie than continue that loop. The first third or so of Hollow Knight felt like a true wonder of the gaming world, but the frustrating combination of difficulty and low QoL left a bad taste in my mouth. For more enthusiastic gamers: 5+/5 For my casual gaming: 3,5/5
PROs: Yoku's Island Express is a great and relaxing little game for the most parts. The visuals, music and atmosphere are amazing. You can't die or lose and there are a lot of checkpoints. I'm not a big fan of pinball games in general, but ended up liking Yoku's pinball adventure a lot for a few hours. CONs: The biggest downside of Yoku is that the further you progress, the more time you'll end up backtracking and looking for things all around the island with only an obscure reference of what you're looking for. The main quest goals are marked in the map, but there are plenty of side quests with no indicators or reminders on what you're looking for or where. There is a fast travel system, but it only covers certain parts of the map, and while you can hop off at many points along the way, you can hop on only from very few points. Kind of like a subway system with 12 stations you can exit from, but you can only enter from either end or the very middle. These issues compound each other: if the fast travel system could be entered from more points (super easy to fix), and had larger coverage, it wouldn't be such a drag traveling around the map looking for things. Or if the game gave you a better indication of what you're looking for and where (e.g. Borderlands 2 style area markers on the map), or at least kept a record of the hints you've received ("what was that area again where someone had left a partner behind in?"), there'd be less need to comb through the whole map multiple times. It'd also be nice if dialogues you've already read could be skipped with the map/inventory close button. There's no way to tell if someone has new dialogue available apart from starting a conversation, and if it's old news you'll have to go through all of it again. A new dialogue indicator would also help. Yoku would easily be 5 stars with less bactracking and obscurity. With them it's a tad below 4,5 stars for me: an absolute delight for a few short hours before the late-game flaws.
HOW TO ZOOM THE CAMERA OUT and fix other issues: Copy OpenJazz to your game folder and start OpenJazz.exe. This should be included and set as default in the GOG release. https://www.dosgamers.com/dos/dos-games/jazz-jackrabbit My opinion is pretty much the same as last three reviewers: The game was nice in its day and still has nice graphics and music, but the slippery controls and other design choices are a constant irritation. I don't particularly like the time limits either, as I prefer to explore and find everything in each level without having to restart it from the beginning. While Jazz was a marvel in its day and took PC platforming years forward in a way that made it easy to look past its design choices, newer games have learned from those mistakes and are more enjoyable to play. Your killer rabbit will lose a quarter of his health by jumping on the back of a flegmatic tortoise, and those tortoises are placed everywhere. The game's mixture of happy run-and-gunning with awkwardly careful creeping didn't work for me anymore. Too many newer games offer better gameplay by either focusing on just one aspect or having spent years mastering a balance. Dead Cells lets you have fun whether you like to sneak around, melee, shoot or speedrun, Broforce is a nice take on a happy run-and-gun, and Door Kickers: Action Squad focuses on a slower, more tactical experience. You may like Jazz if you crave the nostalgia, aren't picky about controls and don't mind time limits. For others, time has run past this once-revolutionary rabbit.
Through the Ages is great as a casual single-player strategy game, a sort of simplified Civilization that works very well. Unfortunately, online multiplayer is locked behind registration. If you wanted a game to play with your board game group remotely and wanted it DRM-free, this is not it. As it is, I'm reviewing mostly the single-player part of the game. Pros - Great game mechanics and setting - The basic mechanics of the game are easy to learn but take a while to master - The tutorial is very good - One playthrough lasts approx. two hours, which is a lot less than most 4X games - The music, sounds and and art fit well together and make playing more enjoyable - There are many challenges with special rules to increase replayability Cons - AI turns are slow even on the fastest setting. This started to bother me after the first couple of games, when I felt like two-hour games included half an hour of waiting. The AI of the first Civilization games made more complex choices faster with a fraction of today's hardware resources. This warrants optimization, especially as we can't play online against friends without forced registration. - The game isn't immersive enough to make the waiting feel worth it. In Civilization 4 and upwards the game was slow because the huge worlds and 3D graphics weren't fully optimized, but there was something to look at while waiting and the world felt exciting enough to make it tolerable. - You have to make some game choices blind, without looking at the situation of your civilization or any other. There seemed to be no logic to when that was possible and when not, so this seems like a UI bug. - If you were looking for exploration, this doesn't have it. Every other part of 4X games is present and well done. Overall for single-player: 4/5 With a faster AI and bug-free UI would be 4.5/5 Online play against friends without registration would make 5/5
The same like a nice cute good-mood exploration game. Unfortunately the controls were so slippery I initially suspected a bug to cause all the delay between keypress and action and the imprecision of jumps. After playing a bit more and reading the other reviews here, they seem like design choices. Bad ones. When you move left or right and stop, the character still continues a couple of steps further. In a platforming game where you can fall into a trap, get hit by an enemy or fall from a climb and have to restart it from the bottom, the precision of sideways movement and jumps is everything. The other nasty part of the controls is grabbing the hanging hooks to reach a higher platform. You have to hit them in just the right angle or the character refuses to grab them. I had many jumps where the characters hands were well within reach of the hook, but just didn't grab it. Everything else about the game was ok: story, art style, early level design etc. Not great, but would have worked easily 4/5 with proper controls. There were some Windows 10 compatibility issues that crashed the computer during the intro, but luckily the next time I opened it it continued from right after the point where the early crash happened so I was both able to play the game and watch the rest of the intro. Luckily I didn't get into any further bugs that other people hinted might be coming as I stopped playing after completing the first mini-mission. Life is too short to waste playing games with bad controls. Had I continued, the unnecessarily slow in-game menus would have been a minor but recurring annoyance. I'm wondering whether the controls and menus both worked more fluidly on Windows 7, but for some reason experience a delay on Windows 10. In either case I'm surprised the developers haven't fixed them, as the rest of the game seems to be a labor of love that I would really like.
Not A Hero was the worst run-and-gun I've played in a long time. Got fed up in a record time of 5 minutes, two mini-missions. There was nothing to do there. You can walk forward, shoot a gun, reload, and slide tackle. That's about it. You can't crouch, you can't jump, and you can't do the hiding in the background trick that enemies do all the time. When you get shot at, you just take it in the face. You can't even choose when exactly to open a door. As soon as you go near, they fly wide open and enemies start shooting at you and you start shooting back. The game itself would be 2/5 despite all the monotony decribed above if it didn't fudge up so many other things as well. Unfortunately it doesn't support native full screen. The only option is a full screen window, which leaves the window's top bar and your operating system's bottom bar visible, as well as window borders. Every time you go to main menu, the window is resized back to medium. There's no video options. To edit any options during a mission, such as music volume, you have to abort the mission to go back to main screen and then start from the beginning after changing the settings. Every mission starts with a nonsensical mission briefing from the player's boss. He words appear too slowly, but as soon as he completes a sentence, it disappears right away, before the next one starts slowly. The briefings are also far too long, especially as the story wasn't interesting, the attempts at humor didn't work for me, and there's no informational value either. This reminded me slightly of Action Squad: Door Kickers, which is an excellent tactical run-and-gun. It does pretty much everything right that this one left half-cooked. I heartily recommend playing it instead. Or if you prefer more action, mayhem and a fun couch co-op of up to four people, try Broforce.
What seemed like a promising metroidvania with rave reviews turned out to be a major disappointment. The reivews voted most helpful praised the smooth controls, but I found them to be the least enjoyable of all the platformers I remember playing. All those reviews were from 2012. Another new one from 2019 states that the controls were very stiff. Wish I read that before buying. I'm not sure whether something has happened in the years between, but most of these issues seem design choices: - When jumping, you have no control whatsoever mid-air - When you're near enough the ledge to fall over it, you fall straight down like a rock - When you move between screens, all enemies are restored to full health - When you fall on an enemy, you take damage, they won’t, even if they’re so squishy they should now be splattered under your boots When you begin to jump, fall, or are hit by an enemy, your trajectory is fixed and you can’t do anything until your feet hit the ground. This often means falling off-screen, back to where you came from. That, in turn, means that all the enemies of that screen are back to full health, as are those you were just fighting in the next screen. At worse getting hit or missing a dodge in one screen can take you several screens back. Having to replay the same screens again and again is not my idea of fun. You also can’t jump onto platforms from below. Combined with the restrictive controls this means that many platforms that look easily accessible cannot be used at all. This made the beginning of the game feel artificially restrictive. Because it didn’t feel fun at all, I didn’t venture further. Try a demo before you buy. The controls and design choices of La-Mulana are not for everyone.
