Recent reviews by KRiLL

Great game. Probably the best visuals I've seen in a metroidvania. Top notch music as well. The story is simple but good. Unfortunately I didn't see the end because I was right before the final boss and steam over-wrote my local saves with old cloud saves. What a bummer. Now I'm less than halfway through the game, so won't probably go through it again.

I got this game because of its great reviews. Sadly, I'm quite disappointed. The story is corny and clunky, the stealth mechanics are cliche and movement is a chore.

This game has every stealth cliche out there. Enemies can't see past 3 feet. If I jump on a light just above a guy, he has no idea. Hiding behind a pot is totally viable for a full grown adult. The guards have obvious patrol patterns. Guards can't spot a guy hanging from a ceiling. The switches to disable lasers are conveniently placed right beside those lasers. I can go on and on. One or two of these are forgiveable. All of them together are not.

And then the movement is just a chore. I don't get it. Its rare to feel like that in 2D side scrollers. I have to press A on my controller every few feet the ninja walks. Might as well replace the movement buttons with A.

I dunno. I expected something better and more mature from a game with such nice reviews.

This is as close to Portal 3 as we can get right now.

The game is really well done. It has great level design, great voice acting, great writing, and some pretty good puzzles.

The atmosphere is very much like Portal 2 with vast structures, and the feeling of loneliness. The overall aesthetic of the game is also quite the same as Portal 2.

The story is great. It has an intriguing start, has some nice twists and turns, and a really satisfying ending. The voice acting and the music elevate the story to another level. The music, as I said, is really well done and elevates the feeling of loneliness or the feeling of tension, depending on the situation.

The puzzles are good, but unlike the other aspects of the game, they are not great. There are no new mechanics introduced, which is a bummer. I was expecting to play around with some cool new stuff. Also, some puzzles are just way too difficult. While I don't mind difficult puzzles all that much, some of them are really long and obscure. This kills the pacing of the game, and made me want to quit midway multiple times. I get that some people like really difficult puzzles, but some of the ones in the game are just way too much.

Overall, Portal Stories: Mel is a blast to play and manages to capture the Portal feel really well. Totally recommended as long as you can stand the rather tough puzzles.

Wow, what a great game!

First off, there are a lot of reviews here talking about crashes and glitches and bugs. I did not encounter anything game breaking, or even annoying. The experience was smooth and flawless.

Now on to the game, it is amazing. Rapture is beautiful and breathtaking. The scale of that thing is great. The atmosphere is very well done, and the game feels tense and tight from the get go.

The player can get special abilities called Plasmids that give you super powers like freezing enemies, setting them on fire, etc. They are a very nice mechanic, and my favourite part of the gameplay. You can mix and match various plasmids to suit your playstyle. You can also upgrade them and unlock new ones.

The gunplay is OK, but nothing great. There are the standard selection of guns: machine gun, shotgun, pistol, RPG, etc. The chemical thrower is a nice weapon. It can either throw napalm (set enemies on fire), electric gel (electric shock) or liquid nitrogen (freeze). It is quite a feeling to just hold mouse 1 and burn everyone around you. There is also the crossbow. It is easily the best weapon in the game. Combine it with plasmids and it is OP.

But honestly, while the gunplay wasn't bad, it wasn't great either. There is not much variety after the first few hours when you have all the weapons. The machine gun is just bad. Pretty much unusable. I also would have liked a sniper. None of the guns really give you any satisfaction that a good shooter should. So the plasmid mechanics are good, but the gunplay is only mediocre.

The dialogs are well written, and the voice acting is stellar. And the story is pretty great too. I won't spoil much, but as you slowly discover more about Rapture, it just pulls you in deeper. There is also the moral choice with the Little Sisters, but I'll let you find that out yourself.

Overall, a really great game. Totally recommended.

Limbo could have been a great game, but it is held back by its mechanics and level design.

The game has a great atmosphere and art style. It is something really unique, and I haven't seen anything like it anywhere. The dark atmosphere is set up really well by the artwork. The sound is OK, but I wouldn't call it great. It gets the job done. The animations are also pretty well done, not just on the main character, but pretty much everywhere.

And that was the good stuff. Now for the bad:

The movement is infuriatingly slow. I don't get why platformers do this. Just make the movement fast and snappy. Combine that with the fact that jumping is also really floaty and slow, this makes for some terrible movement. Platformers should focus a lot on movement. On a good platformer, I know when I will make a jump correctly and when I won't. In Limbo, I have to take a guess and hope for the best. I can't feel precision like I can in Hollow Knight or Ori and the Blind Forest.

The level design is just as bad. Most of the levels are just "go ahead till you die to a gimmick. Then don't next time around". The levels are just pretty much trial and error. Add that with the bad movement, and you got a recipe for disaster. Whenever I die, I cringe because I have to repeat the same boring stuff again.

And if the "puzzle" is not a gimmick, then it is just something you can easily figure out, but is made artificially difficult by making the timing really tight. So now you have to keep repeating the same boring section because you didn't get the timing the last time around. And the terrible movement does not help at all.

The same concepts are re-used in a lot of the puzzles. As if they weren't boring enough. Now you have to repeat a puzzle with a very similar template to a previous one.

So overall, while the game has some really great artwork and atmosphere, its gameplay and mechanics let it down. I was near completion on my 2.6 hours, but in the end decided it just wasn't worth the frustration. This game could have been so much better with some better level design.

Stardew Valley has great visuals, great music, great atmosphere, but in the end it is a game that did not stick with me.

In the beginning I was really into the game. I had fun planting and harvesting. Spelunking was fun too. But all of it got repetitive real quick. I get it that this is the main draw for a lot of people, but I don't dig it. The crops don't give out cash fast enough to upgrade anything. It takes days to get a harvest, and even then, almost a quarter of that goes back into buying seeds. That's fine, but the upgrades are so expensive that there is no way you can get them in reasonable time. In my 9 hours, the only upgrade I could afford was the backpack. If the money came in quicker, the game could have been much more fun.

Having to water your crops every day manually gets repetitive and boring real quick. But guess what? Sprinklers are real expensive. You either have to go to level 40 in the caves to get iron, or buy it from the blacksmith. It takes a lot of time to get to level 40, and the blacksmith is expensive AF. So I had to water manually, and I hated it.

Next, spelunking was also pretty repetitive. You get randomly generated caves, but the enemies are not much varied, and all you have to do it a simple swipe attack to kill them. The first few levels were fun, but it got repetitive real quick. A common trend with this game.

And then comes the fishing. God I hate fishing. The bar you have to keep the fish in is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ floaty it is almost impossible to control. It has the flappy bird type gameplay. It is ♥♥♥♥♥♥ that the dev kept such a great money making way behind such a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ mechanic.

Talking about things I liked, the music is great. It puts you in a relaxing mood, exactly what this game is designed for. The visuals are great too. They are nice and bright and cheerful. The character portraits are drawn really well.

Overall, this game was great in the beginning, but got repetitive real quick in almost all mechanics.

This game is absolutely amazing. The levels are fun to go through. I went with a ghost playthrough, leaving (trying to) no witnesses. Almost all levels I achieved that goal. But the game is so short it left me wanting for more.

The gameplay is simple. You have an objective, and you need to get to it in whatever way you can. This is where the game shines. There are multiple ways to solve the same level, and the game does not punish you for choosing either. You can be a ghost, or you can kill everyone in the level. Your choice. The main gameplay mechanic is rewiring doors, switches, lights, elevators, etc. to distract or take out enemies or to sneak past them. Figuring out the optimal way to beat a level is very rewarding.

The story is simple but better than I expected. The dialogues are not voiced, but that's to be expected from a small indie game. The story is revealed through a series of text messages. The story is kinda engaging and intriguing. There are two slightly different endings depending on the choices you make. The game often breaks the 4th wall, and its pretty funny. The game has a wit and doesn't take itself too seriously.

There is a skill point system but it can largely be ignored because it doesn't really give you any significant choices or affect the gameplay much. There is also a shop where you can buy upgrades. They are usually useful and you can incorporate them is your playstyle pretty well. By the end of the game you can pretty much buy everything.

Overall, a really great game. Took me about 4 hours to beat it. If only it was a bit longer.

The most boring game concept ever but its damn fun

I recommend this game but with heavy caveats. Yes, it is fun, but it is also very difficult and requires EXTREME precision. This resulted in me repeating a level multiple times before I made it. The good thing is that the respawn is very fast and checkpoints are close by so you don't lose much progress on death. Even then, after a few hours, the difficulty got tiring and I left the game unfinished. If you buy this game, be prepared to grind.

The art design is pretty good. And the music is just amazing. It puts you in a nice relaxing mood. While I am not the biggest fan on pixel art, I still found the visuals to be appealing. The backgrounds and music convey a distinct mood that changes with the levels. It is a treat to the senses.

The story is pretty minimal and doesn't have much substance to it. It is added as a side part of the game to provide some small context to the gameplay. It doesn't have much more significance than that. The "voice acting" is just people speaking gibberish. IMO they failed to hit the mark with this one. Hearing the gibberish is tiring and I often skipped the dialogue and just read the text in silence. Compare it with Hollow Knight where the gibberish is distinct for each character and pleasant to the ears.

The level design is usually good but in some places I found some unnecessarily long sections that could have been split into multiple ones. Also, the levels with the fishes are just a pain in the ass. The movement of the fishes is not easy to predict and the hitboxes are kinda messy. Often I thought I would land on top of the fish but ended up registering as a sideways hit and dying.

The controls with a controller take some getting used to. They are pretty standard, but the problem occurs when dashing. The dash can take 8 directions to the analog stick splits into 45 degree windows for each direction. It is very easy to miss the window and dash in a direction you did not want. I often messed up simple jumps because I hit a horizontal dash instead of a diagonal one. Yes, my stick was not properly in the 45 degree window, but it is pretty easy to lose track in a tense run, especially after being so used to the 90 degree windows in most games.

Overall, a pretty good game that isn't for everyone. Only get it if you are ready to handle the extreme difficulty.

A much better game than the previous episode. The gameplay is pretty much the same as Episode 1 and HL2, but it is the story that made me like it more. We get some answers, but a lot of questions. Especially about the G-Man. I was left with some blue balls after that ending. Sadly we probably won't see this story ever completed. Fun game, but I would love to have some closure on the story.