Recent reviews by AccelGate

I love PEAK. What can you say? It really feels like you are, in the words of William Wordsworth, "free as a bird to wander where [you] will." There are definitely some difficult bits and some pro gamer moments to be had, but playing this with friends is really relaxing and freeing. The more you play, the more confident you feel taking on new challenges. Go on: get up there.

I loved this game and can't wait for the next chapter. The puzzles feel fresh and the outdoorsy settings are kind of relaxing to play within. You never really get stuck as there's a way to get a hint about what to do next, so you can be at any skill level in terms of puzzle games to enjoy this. Some of the puzzles are quite tricky and involve careful observation of your surroundings (the camera system helps a ton with this), whereas others are more straightforward logic puzzles that just require a dedicated mind to solve. Really fun game and hoping to catch the next chapter as soon as it's out.

Love this game. I played it so I could go ahead and watch Day9's playthrough without worrying about spoilers, and it didn't disappoint. A really enjoyable puzzle game where I had to look up what I was supposed to do only once. It is really fun to run around and discover secrets and figure out weird ways to overcome challenges. I haven't done 100% yet but I expect I will slowly unlock more eggs over time, since we are in such trying times and all.

I'm still new to the game but have been really enjoying it so far. I'm not sure why it is getting bombed so badly in reviews. It isn't pay to win, and while there is the possibility of paying to unlock an upgraded account status once you start the game, doing this doesn't provide any obvious advantages. The game is difficult and rewards careful and strategic play as well as resource management and teamwork, so if you like these things as well as old school RPG elements, chances are you will really enjoy this game. This is especially true if you have a friend or two to play together with.

In my opinion, this game has a ton of potential and we should support the devs!

It took 50 or so reloads, but I got Lump the Enlightened to give me his horn.

Ignore my playtime, I have been playing this since it launched. I'm not free to play and have probably spent more money in this game than I'd be comfortable seeing in front of me, if I could somehow see how much that had been over the years. Of course, it doesn't do things like tracking your in-game hours or purchases. Why would it do that, when what it seems designed to do is to foster a competitive environment that tempts you to 'work around' its terrible game economy by giving WotC your own money?

I should say that as I am writing this review, I am re-installing MTGA. It is a game that I enjoy quite a bit. My negative review is more 'for the Earth' (as Craig Robinson says in 40-Year-Old Virgin). If you can get in your Magic some other way, then by all means do so. The other negative reviews pretty much say what I would say in support of this point: this is a poorly-maintained game with a bad economy, and after a while, every hour you put into it will start to feel like a crime against everyday people. Everything about this game seems like a cash grab after a while, and although they are moving slowly toward offering more complete paper formats other than Standard, it's still a ways off. What you have, in a nutshell, is sweaty Standard, sweaty Pioneer lite (i.e. Explorer), sweaty Historic, sweaty Historic Brawl, and sweaty Alchemy ranked ladders, with the 'play' ladders (non-ranked) usually being full of sweaty players playing decks that belong on the ranked ladders. So there's really no casual experience here, there's barely any narrative scaffolding as to who you are and what you are doing--basically, there is no 'magic' in 'Magic'.

I enjoy MTGA because at this point I have a good collection and I can play pretty much whatever I want to play. I am also good enough at Magic to get some fun out of the competitive ladder occasionally, although I will attest that, as much as it seems impossible, there is definitely something going on with the shuffler/hand-smoothing that seems to set up certain kinds of interactions in-game, and with matchmaking that seems to promote certain kinds of matchups. These facts alone should honestly dissuade anyone with an interest in a fair competitive experience from playing this. Anyway, if you are new to Magic or don't want to spend money, you should probably (definitely) avoid this game. Did I mention there's basically no social features whatsoever aside from the dumb passive-aggressive emotes? Yeah. It isn't fun except occasionally, and that fun, when it is had, is entirely based on your own amount of psychological investedness in your 'progress' on the ranked ladder. Basically, the more fun you have, the less fun you have, because a loss that feels entirely engineered by the game's 'random' draws is right around the corner.

An enjoyable, mostly VN-style mystery game mixing real life modern Japan with some history and, of course, the occult. I'll keep this review short and sweet: if you don't mind reading, like detective novels, and like the occult, chances are you'll really like Paranormasight. I did use a guide for some parts, as I feel some connections the game wants you to make are a bit overly obscure. I also think they should make it easier to skip through dialogue when you are replaying scenes - which you'll likely be doing a good bit. Finally, there are some achievements you can't get unless you answer questions correctly the first time around, so be vigilant about examining everything! Aside from those few things, a good and sometimes even touching story with a lot of twists and some decent puzzles along the way.

I haven't spent a penny yet and it's been very enjoyable. You don't have to spend any money to actually succeed at the game. Just learn how the game works; it's deeper than it looks and the community is pretty friendly. So why not give it a try?

This is quite simply the best co-op game I have ever played. I had it on Xbox before getting it on Steam and have been playing since it launched. In that time I have had a couple of reliable groups of people to play with, which, in my opinion, is what you need to get the most out of this game. I'll explain below.

I could talk about features and PVP and how much the game has changed and been upgraded since it launched (when it was derided for a lack of content) and the community/pirate rp lifestyle et cetera; but that's not really even the thing(s) that make this game special. What makes SoT special is the unpredictable situations that emerge whenever you play. You simply can't predict what sort of things will happen to you, and how sometimes a foregone conclusion in the gameplay loop (which isn't really a loop) is anything but. Below I'll make a brief list of moments where I thought to myself, "This is the greatest game I've ever played."

Edit: having started that, I realize the items themselves might be quite lengthy, so I'll limit it to three items.

1) Was solo slooping in the Devil's Roar - a part of the map full of active volcanoes whose spew of fiery debris will quickly sink your ship. I had stowed a rowboat on the back of my ship and was using it to row myself over to islands to try to dig up treasures. I would try to get the treasures out of the ground with my shovel and on the rowboat and back to my ship before being disrupted by the volcanic activity of the islands (which included geysers coming up out of the ground). I got a bunch of treasures and then was heading out of the Devil's Roar when disaster struck in the form of a volcanic eruption which managed to sink my ship. When the huge chunks of flaming rock hit your ship, it isn't pretty. But I still had my rowboat, so after the ship had gone down, I gathered my treasure chests out of the boiling waters and loaded them onto the boat. I was then mapless and in the middle of nowhere with a rowboat full of treasure, trying to row back west in order to get to a calmer area. Several times as I was making my way slowly across the waves I encountered enemy players in normal-sized ships (much bigger than rowboats). I rowed like mad and hoped they wouldn't notice me, as I was easy pickings, with no cannon; the only way I could defend myself was with my pistol and cutlass, and even then, I was limited to five shots. Somehow I managed to get back to the easternmost outpost, Ancient Spire, with my rowboat full of loot. At that moment an enemy ship appeared and the crew came up on the dock as I approached. I knew they were going to kill me, so I pulled out my bullhorn (an item that lets you talk to other players in voice chat) and started begging them to let me sell my stuff. I told them I had been sunk in the Roar and had been slowly rowing my way back to civilization for literal (in-game) days. After I explained my situation, the leader said, "Actually, we were going to kill you and take your stuff, but after hearing that story, we'll help you unload it instead." That's just what they did. This was an emerging situation that I couldn't have predicted, and it immediately ensconced this game in my heart.

2) More recently (the day before yesterday as of this writing) I was on my own captained Brigantine which is dubbed Deliver Me Timbers. We called it Deliver Me Timbers as a terrible pun and because my crew of 3 has been focusing on completing merchant cargo missions, mostly delivering goods and also caged animals around the map. To that extent we are pretty passive when it comes to PVP, and when another ship engages us, we usually try to outmaneuver them. On this particular run we were in the midst of collecting animals to sell, which was one of the first activities you could do in the game, but is by no means easy to do - aside from the vagaries of islands which throw skeletons and phantoms at you, you have to actually find the type and color of animal requested and get it into the cage and back to the ship/buyer. On top of that, other players will see you flying the Merchant Emissary flag and think, hey, fresh meat. We had already been sank once that day by a pretty good PVP crew so when we saw another ship coming for us, we let off a collective groan. The good news is, they weren't very good and we sank them. The bad news is, they collected a new ship and came back for another round and at this point we were out of cannonballs. The last thing we needed was to collect five chickens and we had found an island on which to do that, so we decided to get the animals while under fire. It seemed like suicide to me, but I ended up sailing my brigantine around and around the island in a circle while my two crewmates went ashore with cages, found the chickens, and then I picked them up again by strafing close to the shore. I must have gone around the island over a hundred times while my friends searched for the right chickens; the whole time the enemy was following behind me, shooting cannonball after cannonball. They even hit a couple of times. But we somehow managed to get the chickens and sail away to finish the voyage. It was probably the funniest thing I've ever done.

3) Lastly, this happened yesterday as of this writing. We had another voyage (on DMT) which called for a whopping 11 animals - 7 pigs and 4 snakes. Obviously, you can't put the snakes near the pigs even in cages, because they'll spit poison and kill the pigs. So we had to load them on separate parts of the ship, and with 7 pigs on the mid-deck, and 4 snakes on the topdeck near the bowsprit, it felt like a floating zoo. Not to mention that captured pigs are constantly whining for food and if you don't feed them, they'll die. So it's a race against time, the game elements, your food supply, and PVPers to get the floating zoo back to the right outpost to sell. Of course, we didn't expect the Kraken to attack us, but that's what happened. While we were fighting desperately against the Kraken, repairing the ship, and trying to feed/bail water out of the mid-deck so the animals didn't drown or starve (we had to move the snakes to the mid-deck too so the Kraken didn't kill them) another ship came up to us and the guy came aboard while we were frantically responding to the situation. I panicked for a second, but he immediately started bailing, helping us with cannons, and bringing over supplies from his own ship to keep ours afloat. This Kraken was a doozy, however, and even though we managed to chase it off, our ship took too much damage and we sank, with all eleven animals floating in the ocean. We had to pile them onto a rowboat - pigs and snakes within a foot of each other on either end of the same rowboat - along with all of our other stuff we could salvage; then someone had to keep playing music to pacify the snakes while we hooked the rowboat up to the guy's sloop and he towed us to the nearest outpost. Also, the pigs were hungry and we had no food. Sadly by the time we got there all the pigs except one died of either starvation or snake bites. We did manage to sell all the snakes however, and one pig...

I present these rather sketchily-told stories as demonstrations of what I have been calling emergent gameplay. None of these situations could have been foreseen or even prepared for, and required a mixture of game knowledge, passive skill developed over time, and quick/improvisational thinking, plus a lot of cooperation between friends. Not to mention, they all involved other players either being helpful or hostile; but you can't know which one until it's happening! Some people are looking to better the world, and some people just want to see it burn. I really don't understand giving this game a negative review though - it's got an amazing balance of human and AI elements, game mechanics, immersion, etc. = a better multiplayer experience overall than any other game in recent memory. It just might be my favorite game of all time.

I know that this is a remake (or reimagining) of an older game, and for that reason is supposed to hearken back to the difficulty of an earlier generation of games. (That's right, you kids don't know what it was like in my day...)

I'll just say this--if you love, love, love Oddworld (I used to), I think you will be alright with this game. Why am I giving it a thumbs down then? Because it frequently made me feel lousy while playing it, not in a "this is challenging but still fun" sort of way, but in a "the fairly unreasonable difficulty level of this game is enhanced by clunky controls and bad AI to become consistently frustrating" sort of way. I'm just not patient enough to stick around for what it wants me to do, and this is one of the first games I ever put in for a refund after playing a good chunk of it, rather than sticking it out.

I'll try to list a few things off the top of my head which may help clarify my point above:

1) I frequently found myself uttering things like, "This game really punishes you for not respecting all of its stupid little mechanics" while I was playing. Probably a not fair thing to say. But what Oddworld: Soulstorm has that the older games didn't, afaik, is that you have to be constantly scrounging for items from trash cans and lockers in order to craft more items to use to deal with enemies. If you don't do this, you can't bypass certain areas of the game. Combine this with the impetus to rescue Mudokans on each level, the 'score' it gives you for not rescuing enough at the end, and the fact that you eventually have to arm your Mudokans with the items you find in order to have a chance at rescuing enough, and it just feels like too much and not really worth the payoff. The problem for me is that the game just isn't immersive like the old ones were because it is mired in video-gamey mechanics. You don't feel like you're exploring a weird world full of weird creatures. Everything feels like another level of a tutorial designed to test your skill and timing. Some people may love this but I didn't.

2) On some levels, you can't rescue all the Mudokans if you don't do things the right way. For example, and this is something of a spoiler, there's a level where you need to use a flying slig to open the bottom of a train car in order to be able to access a few Mudokans. But there's a finite number of flying sligs, so if you accidentally use them all--which is not very difficult to do if you aren't aware of it--you can't rescue the Mudokans. I don't remember this being a feature of the original Oddworld. You could rescue every Mudokan if you took the time to do it and didn't have to restart the level. Soulstorm has a replay mode instead where it doesn't affect the story at all and you can "try to raise your Quarma" (the happy/angry Mudokan score you get at the end of each level). This adds to the feeling that levels are just prolonged tutorials which present you with a series of tests to pass; rescuing Mudokans is just compounding the challenge of the test.

Maybe the game was always like this and I was too young to notice before, but it feels like they've doubled down on the video-gamey aspect of things at the expense of immersion in the world. On top of that, the game has a few bugs, framerate drops and input lag issues which make its fairly hair-splitting level of difficulty quite unreasonable. It feels like it is caught between being a narration about liberation and conformity on the one hand, and being a barebones platformer focused on mechanical intricacy on the other.

This'll be my last point: without flatly contradicting many of the positive reviews here (and again, maybe I'm just old now), I do not feel like there is a great sense of world-building or of unfolding lore. You find out Abe and the other Mudokans escaped from Rupture Farms and are now fleeing capture. You find out that, somehow, Abe still has work to do. Then the enemies come and you start running through levels. There's a few lines of dialogue here and there, there's a level where Abe has to craft a potion to heal some Mudokans (he only has to do this once), but other than that, I didn't feel like there was anything special happening, no larger narrative unfolding. Of course, there's a mysterious item that Abe is staring at during an opening cutscene with a train. I never found out what that was, so maybe I just didn't play long enough to get into the story.