Recent reviews by HughManatee

oof

This is the best free to play game in existence, bar none.

The only problem is that it has a lot of connection issues. Between getting booted to the menu, or the game completely locking up and not responding, or crashing to desktop, it's something you have to get used to. It just so happens that the game is worth it.

Mark of the Ninja is the best stealth game in existence, and easily top 3 of ninja platformers. If you don't own this, you don't like stealth games or ninja games.

I like card games (the gameplay not the pricing models) and I love roguelites. So I should have liked this game.
And there were things to like. I liked the way combat flowed in general, and the blocking mechanic was somewhat clever. But I found the experience lacking overall.

Many roguelites have the issue where they ramp difficulty in a way that you will feel like you are on top of the world and then suddenly everything goes wrong. FTL, EtG, BoI, etc... you think of any roguelite/like and you should be able to remember a time when this happened to you. But in most of them, there are ways you can manage. Some just require better play in the early game, some require mechanical skill in the moment, but the important part of this genre is that you should be able to identify where you made mistakes so you can improve them.

Slay the Spire has moments which are flat out unwinnable. Where there is literally nothing you could do except draw the right cards at the right time. You can't bluff AI, so when you draw nothing useful, you can do nothing. This is a part of card games, so it's to be expected. But it's a part of card games that is incompatible with permadeath. And it is enough to singlehandedly ruin a game which otherwise would have been enjoyable.

Stunlock should give up, disband, and everyone go their separate ways, and find real jobs. After ruining what little potential Battlerite had with poor decisions from day 1, they tried to jump on the battle royale ship like everyone else and they failed in pretty much every way possible. I think the only BR which is worse than this one is that CSGO danger zone ♥♥♥♥.

Tbh I still love this game, but I don't recommend it for a number of reasons.

The first is the soundtrack debacle. I'm not talking about the false DMCA claims by a psychopath, I mean the fact they used classic RCR music in the trailer yet there's none of that classic music in the game itself. That's false advertising to me.

The second is that, due to the ridiculous legal debacle and wasted effort on soundtrack that I mentioned above, the devs didn't have the resources or passion left to really maintain this game properly.

Finally, the major selling point of this game, to me, was playing that oldschool kunio-kun feel online with other players. Unfortunately, the community is ♥♥♥♥ and the devs allow any random person to join the game you are hosting and change friendly fire settings. So one person with a maxed out character can join your innocent multiplayer session, turn on FF and start destroying you, robbing you of all of the money you had earned, or perhaps just trolling you by never moving forward so you can't progress.

It's a long grind in a dead game. It was a good attempt, but the devs didn't have it in them to make this what it should have been.

However, if you have friends to play it with, the value goes up significantly. Just keep in mind that playing with randoms is basically impossible.

Hands down the best Cold War era border control sim ever made.

I have heard so many people recommend this game as a great metroidvania. Now that I finally have it, I wonder how many of them have played good games.

This game is okay. The boss fights are boring, the patterns are fairly easy to figure out and execute, and the items are jank af. Story is good enough I guess, and I like how the grapple is a throwback to bionic commando. But otherwise idk, you might pass on this and not miss anything. You should only buy this if you already own Valdis Story.

One of the greatest metroidvanias of all time.

Way better than it looks, trust this random stranger on the internet. What could go wrong?