ToD is a Turret Defense / Action Overhead Dungeoncrawler. Each dungeon is comprised of a series of interconnected rooms, with navigation options available between the start of the dungeon and the potential exit points. Each room plays out over the course of maybe two to four minutes, if it happens to be a room with a combat encounter (and it seems like most are). This is a fun conceit - you bring your acquired materiel into a room and have to design your Turret/Trap layout based on the lay of the land, so there is no Right And Proper design structure. Sometimes the room is so contravened to good item placement with your available resources that you'll end up just playing it as a straight (hard) twitch/(soft)bullet-hell combat. Because you are provided with the wave structure of the incoming enemies, as well as where they can enter, you can make rational decisions about what to place where. Because enemies can destroy your resource pool by breaking your traps/turrets, it's not always prudent to go for maximum DPS if it would expose your equipment to damage. Because enemies don't arrive until you hit the "Go Ahead" button, you have plenty of time to consider your options. You are constantly being asked to commit to a battle plan, then execute it in real time. Combat isn't sloppy, but is frantic and chaotic at times. I haven't beaten I Want To Be The Guy, but have won BoFH : Servers Under Seige at the hardest difficulty, so I think I'm "pretty fair to good" at twitch reflex action games, and ToD becomes legitimately challenging halfway through the first dungeon. It respects your skills as a player. "Currencies", money and the various scrap, seem well balanced if on the hard/tight side. Having enough to get through a room depends on how well you balanced in earlier rooms. but you'll usually have enough to get by... but nowhere near what you'd want to have. A fun game, well balanced, harder than the cute aestetics suggest.
Plot : The last of the V8 Interceptors is destroyed and Max needs a new car. You get a replacement immediately, but wouldn't you like to grind hours for upgrades so it's slightly less terrible? Gameplay : Drive from A to a huge range of B locations, left click until the nutters at B are pummelled into submission (ocassionally right clicking to parry, for variety). Walk up to anything with a hotspot icon and hold the Action button to do a thing. Repeat for a hundred hours. Plot (B) : It's a game about 'Mad' Max. He's going to survive, but not develop or advance in any meaningful way. There will be a hint or two at the possibility of a redeption arc, but it's going to end with Max in exactly the same place he was as in the beginning. Nothing you do matters. Difficulty : Almost nonexistent. Your car gets repaired to full if you sit in Park for thirty seconds. Fighting is just left clicking, with some very easy right-click timing to avoid taking damage. It never gets anywhere near as complicated or engaging as in something like Hand of Fate. If you do manage to 'die', you respawn nearby without penalty. The World : New-Max, with a stable-but-oppressive wastelander society you slap around a bit. Very "Fury Road". Big chunks of the map are gated off with equipment requirements, access to which are in turn arbitrarily gated by Max's level, so you can't just drive to the obvious Heart of Darkness without a certain arbitrary amount of faffing around for XP. Summary : Although it's 90% just holding "W" down, driving around the wasteland is pretty and feels good. Combat is one-button Simon (right click if the enemy's "I'll hit you soonish" icon appears), but flows reasonably well. It is easy to zone out and ... enjoy?... the moment to moment play, despite how little anything matters in any way. It's a time killer, but not really anything else. 3.5 stars, rounded down for unskippable splash pages and long load times. TLDR - Play "Brutal Legend" instead?
"The Church in the Darkness" is a top-down sneak/shoot 'em up about going into a dangerous and unknown situation and trying to keep your head. While the compound where the game takes place is clearly modelled off of The People's Temple, the variable nature of the major characters' sanities, drives, purposes, and interdependencies / relationships means that you shouldn't go into a given game assuming the leader is Jim Jones and imminent disaster is just around the corner. You are an intruder so they will react negatively to your presence, but they could all be reasonable people and legit true believers. There might not be anyone 'crazy' or meth'ed out. Or maybe the one or two who are don't really have any authority. The kid you're sent in to rescue might want to stay - how bad does it need to be to justify extracting him anyway? Or how good does it need to be to ignore his family's pleading and leave him to the future he has chosen (and is choosing)? Maybe you don't even want to leave, yourself? Or, maybe, it's a literal Hell on Earth situation, where 'going loud' and breaking the security apparatus by slaughtering anyone armed before the Flavor-Aid gets passed around might just save lives. If you're willing to engage at that level - needing to pass something like a real in-the-moment assessment of the cult instead of relying on Video Game violence-justified-through-assigned-antagonist-status 'Blood Templar' style play - if you can engage on that level, proactively reassessing how much of a spanner in the works you ought to be, then the relatively short game is worth replaying a couple of times. Death is quick if you get in over your head, but the scenario is short. Lots of unlocks to carry into future playthroughs. It's not AAA by any stretch, but a good addition to the 'late 90s/early 00s overhead shooter' genre (BOFH, TK Killers, Hotline Miami, Nocturn [the other one]) with MG:S inspired 'Infiltration' gameplay. A "Top 500" video game, probably.
Wall World deserves to be remembered as one of the great "Dig a hole, collect resources, get into trouble, die repeatedly to make winning possible" games. Moment to moment play is engaging. Asyncronous boss and wave countdowns press down on you, demanding your attention, as you navigate the overworld and plumb the limits of the scattered places where mining is possible. Constant small choices under time constraints. (Go for upgrades or dense resource pockets? Is it time to move to another mine? Dump your stash and grab another tool, or press on a hair further first?) There are multiple upgrade layers. Each mine yields cash, an abundant ore needed for everything, and one special type of ore. Your gear resets, and has to be found piece by piece, with many of the potential pieces not spawning on any given game, demanding flexibility. Each item has a unique tech tree that resets each run, where you dump specific ores to upgrade your kit. The cash money gets spent between runs to upgrade a whole different, persistent tech tree related to your vehicle. So you're constantly balancing whether to maximize raw digging (and thus cash), exploration (and thus new kit), or ore acqusition (and thus making your kit better), all while those clocks keep ticking. Combat's fun, with enough variety to make weapon and tactic swapping prudent. The art is gorgeous - backgrounds change based on time and weather, each level of each component of your vehicle has a distinct presentation, different mines are made of different materials with very different vibes, everything's distinct enought to be immediately parsable. It'd be easy for this to be an unbalanced mess, given the RNG chosen gear options, but each setup I found over about two dozen runs was viable. That alone makes this game worth study, in my opinion. Lots of fun plot nuggets scattered around. The end is great. It went on maybe three 'runs' longer than it needed to, but I had a lot of fun, and would recommend it.
I've been playing for about two hours and I'm looking forward to the game. So far I've been vaguely impressed by the environmental layout (it's roughly par for one of the System Shocks, a bit behind Prey), I've read the same magazine page a dozen times (strange how they always falls open in the same place), and I've listened to an NPC slowly work through the mandatory omnious-yet-unspecific horror movie checklist of lines that exist to pad out schlock horror films to 80 minutes. I've played "How long can you shine a flashlight into an NPC's eyes before they notice you exist" (about ten seconds) and been advised by the on-screen help system that Survivors will leave me alone if I don't harass them, while I wait to respawn from being gunned down by Survivors for existing within fifty feet of them (intentionally failing an insultingly easy stealth sequence to see if it even could be failed). I've enjoyed a soundtrack so bombastic that I knew nothing important was going to happen and I could take a drink while I waited for a scripted event to play out. I've gone hunting for the environmental prompts that my Point-Of-View character is reacting to seeing, which I haven't actually looked at yet. But I ~haven't~ done anything vaguely resembling "Playing a survival horror game". Maybe it gets great. People seem to love this game. But how long is too long for a tutorial, for a walking sim set in an IP we're all already familiar with? If your players are banging their wrench onto things to try to get the Alien to finally show up, two hours into your Alien game, your tutorial is too long. It has Machine For Pigs syndrome, where you want to chase everything vaguely threatening in the hopes that SOMETHING might finally HAPPEN. I could have watched Alien by now! Inferior to Amnesia : The Bunker, which is (theoretically) the same general moment-to-moment. hunted/survival horror gameplay. The Bunker actually starts, and keeps going, from about fifteen minutes in until the end.
This album is worth picking up for the last two tracks alone, if nothing else. The instrumental versions of About That and Paradise (Stay Forever) really let the sax shine and sell the nuances that are a bit covered by the vocals in the original versions. Paradise is my go-to morning alarm track. Starts subtle enough to catch before it wakes anyone else up, amps up enough to wake me if I'm deep down, carries a head-bobbing groove long enough to drag some energy into my carcass on mornings when I just can't summon up the strength to flop out of bed.
"Paradise Killer" is a walking simulator broken up by bits of visual novel... or vice versa. Doesn't sound like much of a game. ... you ever see a bridge? Like, an AMAZING bridge? One that makes you say "Wow, really?" and question the cognitive boundaries we put between Engineering and Art? Or have a meal *so darn good* that you get aroused? Or see a sunset that is literally wordless poetry? Paradise Killer has a deep and interwoven d-r-i-v-e pulsing through it, from the soundtrack to the visuals to the background collectathons to the eliptical esoteric eternity-seeking questing of the character's "organization", that all coalesces into a mind capturing drumbeat which owns the space between your ears when you play. It is an experience, I suspect a one-of-a-kind sort, that demands player engagement. Does that make it a good game? To be a game, there needs to be interesting and impactful choices to be made. Are there? Well... there's one. But it's a big one! You can wrap up your investigation essentially any time after the first ten minutes and start pronouncing judgement concerning the one crime you are tasked with investigating. And at any given moment, the temptation to do so lurks, overshadowed by the urge to better understand the situation first. Brilliant design! You're done when you want to be! By the end you'll understand the weirdness, the plot(s) at play, and why the person(s) who are Guilty are far from the only ones Not Innocent. It's up to you to decide how complicit someone needs to be to be worthy of punishment, or if reasonable motives override terrible actions, or if the fate of a society should trump the "justice" for/of an individual. Should a terrible person be punished even if they didn't commit the crime you're looking into? Lots of very specific "How About THIS Person?" choices to make. Wonderful. (I broke my Hard No on DLCs for this game, the B Side soundtrack is so good. And those are the tracks that didn't make the cut!)
I loved RE3 as a kid. This looked like a good modern follow up. Rather than do a breakdown, for this review I'll detail the first few times I tried to play it. Attempt 1, "Daymare" difficulty : You're a cynical wetwork op going into a known hard target. You carry a pistol, a rifle, and ten spare pistol rounds for this prolonged 'kill everything' op. You deploy without a second rifle mag and the MC refuses to take his mag out to reload it. You can accumulate bricks of ammo and have an empty rifle, as it will not let you reload a weapon directly OR eject your only magazine. Everything is balanced with tight margins at this difficulty, so you're meleeing instead since the rifle is useless. The MC won't hit a prone enemy, and they are immune to melee attacks while standing up. If you're too close when the invisible switch flips from IMMUNE to FIGHTING, you're instantly grappled, even if you're directly behind them. (Not 'quickly'. Instantly. 0 frames between facing away from you and a grappling QTE). Melee takes ages, so you have to try to time it so punches land AFTER the invincibility but BEFORE you get grappled. One hit takes a third of your health. Many hits visibly land but don't register. It's just awful. I quit, my pistol empty, fifty loose unusable rifle rounds in my pockets, when I got to the point that I had to RNG / Jank a half dozen zombies between save points with one hit remaining. Attempt 2 - Second hardest difficulty : A total cakewalk. Two or three shots on average instead of Daymare's six-ish. Hits take less than a tenth of your HP. Got trapped on terrain early in chapter 2, realized I wasn't being challenged or scared, and quit. Attempt 3 - Mercenary Mode : Ammo everywhere. No survival horror, just action, but VERY easy. Lots of jogging down empty identical corridors while overly dramatic music swells. Quit twenty minutes in, bored, weighed down in consumables. Four hours in, I'm cutting my losses.
Pros : - The art is solid - There's a lot of variety between locations - Audio is (usually) also pretty well suited to the scene and the emotions the designers were trying to envoke. Cons : - Puzzles enter into "rub everything on everything else to guess what the designer was thinking" territory at times. - The plot is.... ...is... ...okay, so the Main Character is a young Jewish man (see the pics above, check the hat) whose three bosses are identical bobble-headed antisemetic cariactures, heartless money-lenders who send the MC out to repossess property from people. (It's not just the character design, there's lots of word choice and behaviors that invoke early 20th century stereotypes of European Jews.) MC has a couple of different repos to perform, necessitating some item based "classic adventure game puzzle solving", at one point literally performing the blood libel because it's the only "Rub A On B" option that (through an unpredictable and illogical chain of consequences) allows the plot to continue. Eventually he makes partner in the firm, and without the player's input (or even awareness until after the fact) he's so heartbroken over what he's become that he quits, instead of improving things now that he actually has the power to do so, and decides to "EAT A BIG SANDWICH" in the ending cutscene. So it's a moon-logic puzzle game with excellently executed atmosphere, whose core message is about how terrible "those people" are. Our "hero" "saves" himself from "moral degeneration" in "their" presence by taking a gun and .... eating that sandwich. A solid skip. Like, skip it if you got it for free. I feel a little disgusted just rereading my review above. (I got this and the sequel simultaneously during a deep, deep discount sale, so I peeked at #2 for about fifteen minutes too - more of the same, just happening in hell / a dreamscape / wherever, so it's narratively justified for the puzzles to make even LESS sense.)
Excellent atmosphere, speedy load times, and Strategic/Tactical loop almost make for an excellent game. In a lot of ways Company of Crime emulates Phantom Doctrine, a good choice, with a bit of Republic: The Revolution thrown in. Unfortunately, I got roughly five hours in and hadn't been challenged once, playing at the recommended difficulty. Neither the strategic overview nor the tactical engagements ever felt risky or like I had a meaningful choice to make. I don't believe I got less than "outstanding!" on any mission. It has amazing atmosphere and decent moment-to-moment flow, but play boils down to a series of obvious choices and curb stomp battles in your favor. The interface has infuriating problems. The game autoselects targets and positioning, making real dumb choices you'll override. Selecting a new target OR confirming the autoselected one are both done via left-button mouse click. Click one pixel outside the outline of your (weaving in place) intended target, you do the dumb stuff instead. If your intended target is one step outside of your range, it'll get the "HEY SELECT ME!" outline like a legitimate target, but clicking on it acts as confirmation to do the dumb thing instead. Clicking on the square you want to move to pre-action, trying to manually reselect your position, confirms the dumb thing instead. Try to click on a character behind a wall that the restricted, forcibly zoomed in "action cam" put in your place? Dumb action instead. It won't cost you the game - the AI is equally dumb and has like half your HP - but it is infuriating when one in ten orders you give gets ignored because of bad UI. Hotkeys - They use the number bar. A given number does NOT lock to a given action, and if you have more than ten potential actions (which you will) the last few just don't get keyboard keys. Real half baked. Pretty, with a promising looking gameplay loop, but it's annoying and unchallenging. A near miss, I can't recommend it as of Feb '25.
