Käyttäjän Legolas_Katarn viimeaikaiset arvostelut

:Originally completed on Itch:

You are a newly created reaper office drone handling the "daily" paperwork to decide who lives and dies by reading short details about their life, while working for a boss who has grown tired of existence while sometimes leaving his cat in charge of things, and while occasionally meeting colleagues in the bar after work. Somewhat light hearted Papers Please, you need to maintain daily death numbers in general to prevent being fired but have more freedom and money is just used to buy drinks, cosmetics, or items to give more details on how people effect the world. The world can be in a good or bad state in regards to peace, economy, medicine, and the environment based on your choices. It's a short and more often funny game, you can get different endings and discover some new things based on your choices but there isn't a large amount going on, a new game + mode gives you some new conversation options and allows you to keep items and for some of your bought items to remember the positive and negative effects allowing someone to live or die will have on the world. Choosing who lives and dies is often a bit arbitrary, outside of whether or not you are trying to follow certain orders, as it is difficult to tell what exactly will happen if someone lives or dies. The death of someone might see large donations to their cause or a cause in their name, an old lady who seems to just want to continue her hobby in robotics might be making a death dealing robot. As entertaining as the characters you meet in the bar can be, you only talk to each of them once and most days the bar isn't even open.

Well voice acted.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1414897387538165770

A good narrative with a great presentation that gives us a solid Werewolf The Apocalypse game that provides you more time to enjoy being a werewolf than the previous game did.

A partial sequel to Heart of the Forest where you play as a new character while also running into and working with the main character and some of the supporting cast of the previous game, though this one can be played without you missing out on much if you skipped the first.

Purgatory has you playing as a woman from Afghanistan who comes from a sect of werewolves. The game opens as you attempt to get through the border to Poland with your younger brother to join your aunt, passing through the forest that was the main setting of the previous game. While there you learn that the local werewolves have had one of their members recently killed and that many are split on a desire to help the refugees and protect them from the border guards while others see them as distractions from their purpose in fighting creatures of the Wyrm. One werewolf in charge of his own pack recently seems to have developed a hatred or suspicion of refugees and blames them for their recent loss. You end up being able to join a character from the previous game as you look into the death of the werewolf or you can join your pack leader in investigating the mounting schism in the werewolf community.

Purgatory primarily functions the same way as the previous game, a visual novel where the different stats you gain (in wisdom, glory, and honor), trust levels with possible friends and allies, and maintaining different levels of rage, health, despair, and willpower can effect the actions you can perform and the choices and information available to you. It also maintains the atmospheric artwork and music and sound of the previous game. Where Purgatory surpasses the former is by having you start out as a werewolf with many more opportunities to shapeshift between your five different forms and more times for your amount of rage to effect your possible actions. When the game begins you can choose one of three different skills in physical, social, and mental categories that can give you new ways to deal with or attempt to deal with problems. A choice between five auspice options gives you a one use power that can help in certain situations and can provide unique flavor to text or information based on the knowledge you have, choosing between one of five tribes does the same, you also choose between one of three packs but those don't give you a power and I don't remember the one I chose ever doing anything but I played a route that was probably less likely for it to come up. Early in the game you get two different story routes that you can follow that greatly change what you are doing and who you are spending time with, this is also a good change as the previous game mostly had one path with different minor routes to get to know a bit more about the rest of the cast and was much more likely to end with you feeling like you were missing things without multiple playthroughs.

It is a short game, with my first playthrough taking under three hours. Issues with that come from them needing to include more seemingly ridiculously minor ways to potentially lower your limited willpower or to effect your rage, I actually never found a moment in my playthrough where I could use any item I picked up or either of the two gifts I gained from my chosen auspice or tribe with the paths I chose so while you might seemingly get a lot of options many might not necessarily matter in your playthrough. There is also no way to make manual saves, the game just autosaves as you reach certain points in each minor section of a chapter so you don't have much ability to go back and change your decisions or see alternate routes without starting a new game, and when you start the new game you don't even have the normal visual novel options of rapidly making text you have seen before progress until you reach something new.

Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1830429045911343221

A mediocre action platformer whose platforming stage design and arena like combat stage designs never reach the heights of its inspirations like Dust Force or N+ with the additional issue of awkward controls and momentum use that never feels right and a dull narrative and hub section to explore.

The story features a cyberpunk setting where your extremely annoying character has been diagnosed with an incurable disease and is told about a new possible treatment that involves going into a digital world created from her mind where completing the challenges she faces there can reduce and reverse the spread of her illness. You explore a hub world where you find two types of challenge rooms, one focused on platforming that has you attempting to reach the end as fast as you can while maintaining a synch combo by constantly collecting pickups and destroying enemies that don't attack you and the other room type offering a more closed off combat focused test where you have to destroy all the enemies and collect all the pickups with the enemies now being more varied and having different wats to attack you. Your performance in each stage is ranked getting an A or an S rank will give you 1 or 2 items needed to progress the game by allowing you to access more areas of the hub, while getting an S+ rank gives you an item used to access more advanced challenge rooms for side content.

Platforming gives you a dash ability that can be performed on the ground and in mid air and a double and triple jump along with the ability to run up walls, run along ceilings, and slide down steeper slopes to gain speed. Your attacks consist of a light attack that is quick and does one damage, a slower heavy attack that gives you more range and hangtime in the air that does three damage, and if you find a pickup to charge it a gun that can be aimed in a direction in slow motion that damages or destroys anything in its path. Destroying enemies in mid-air refills one use of either a jump or dash and in certain stages they have to be destroyed to allow you to advance to the end. Your only real hazards in the platforming sections are falling off cliffs and areas of the environment that are red that you can basically think of as spikes in a lot of other similar games (even being similar enough to many games in that they have extremely questionable hit detection that not even the game seems to understand as it frequently will partially move the camera and your character like you landed a jump while it also kills you and moves you back to the checkpoint). Everything about these stages is generic with nothing new or interesting offered, worse it just all controls awkwardly requiring you to hit down to make use of sliding or to drop from ceilings (and I mean DOWN, no touching right or left at all like in a normal game or it just isn't going to work) your running speed and momentum rarely feel right and some of the more frustrating moments had me eventually having an Angry Video Game Nerd moment where I realized "You can just walk over it" (do nothing and she will probably get by it by herself, usually the movement was a bit too questionable for guarantees). If you die you can be taken back to a checkpoint, which can lead to moments of confusion as you aren't informed about where these checkpoints are and when you spawn back in the camera is probably in a completely different place than when you were last on that spot. Many of these stages also waste time by having the first half be some simplistic thing easily gotten through with no effort before suddenly throwing in some more usually moments you aren't going to be ready for unless you know they are coming which will then force you to restart everything else after you die to try to get a better score since progression can be locked to your rankings not just your basic completion.

The combat stages give you all the same abilities only you have aggressive enemies attacking you in a large but enclosed area where you need to take a path that will allow you to kill everything and pick everything up as fast as possible for the best ranking. Some enemies doing things like launching seeking missiles at you and the wall climbing remind me of N+ but there is nothing fun or interesting about these stages as the enemies almost never pose any threat and their attacks can be destroyed with your own. Even when I thought I did badly time wise on these I was often given an S+ ranking. The times I found myself most likely to be hit was when one started up their attack animation when they were barely on or not on the screen yet due to the camera.

Some side activities see you trying to reach harder to get to areas in the hub areas to collect floppy disks for more setting details and discovering more out of the way harder challenges to get video game cartridges for an even more annoying version of Skippy from the Expeditionary Force series. Other than that, the hub area really offers nothing apart from some decent visuals and constant needless references to other media instead of doing much for its own setting.

Even if I were to think about it being entirely just me having problems with the way this game controls and moves and I was able to control everything with no issues like I can in most in games, while it would certainly make the game less frustrating, when compared to similar titles it still wouldn't be offering anything interesting in any area and therefore still wouldn't make it very good.

I supported it on Kickstarter and was added to the credits as a backer and as a character profile in the game.

Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1830133116704604320
https://youtu.be/PD1gMkjhK_0?si=CRTEGZHxzwbd7QnK

A sequel that makes minor but all positive changes to what was originally already solid tactical game with good artwork.

Fuga 2 has the same gameplay as the original title, fate again has the children aboard a powerful tank chasing down the one they used in the previous game that has been commandeered by someone who has also taken some of cast hostage. You fight 1-3 waves of various enemies making use of each characters weapon type (machine gun, grenade launcher, or cannon), their base damage, speed, and crit skills, their unique skills that use the tank's SP, and the passive bonus each character gives when placed in a support role for one of the three active gunners that can be something like additional damage or HP regeneration. Enemies may be be easier to hit with a certain type of weapon or hitting them with certain attacks may delay their turns. Between battles your tank travels across the chapter's terrain giving you options of taking easier or more dangerous paths that will likely have more items and less regenerating supplies but more items and experience. Reaching certain points in each chapter allows you to spend AP to have the characters talk to raise their affinity with each other for stronger support bonuses, cook meals for stat improvements, grow food to cook those meals, upgrade weapons, sleep for an XP boost and to recover injured characters, speak to depressed characters to help them recover, etc.

The main changes from the previous game are that some of the characters abilities and weapon types have changed, partially to avoid some easily exploitable strategies and due to having one old character not playable for this game. An airship can be run into on the map that you can pay to drop replenishing supplies for you, pay to bomb enemy targets on the map so you won't have to fight them, buy and sell items at a shop, or you can pay to transport your tank back so that you can travel alternate paths for more more items and experience. The soul cannon of the first game that allowed you to sacrifice a character to win a battle has been changed, no longer being just a pointless inclusion no one would have a desire to ever use. In normal fights the soul cannon is replaced with a different powerful attack that will injure one of the characters and remove them from the battle and cause you to receive no experience for the fight. When fighting bosses the new AI inside of your tank will automatically activate the soul cannon if you reach a certain percentage of health where a character is then random chosen to be sacrificed unless you can win the battle in a set number of turns. While I never even came close to having the soul cannon used (or even activated) this is certainly a more interesting method of use than in the previous game and there are events that can only show up in certain chapter if particular characters are alive or dead, so you can see them repercussions from losing a character aside from just gameplay ones. A new addition is the ability to build up empathy or resolve points based on conversation choices that allow the main character access to passive bonuses that can be activated in battle when you pass certain thresholds, depending on if you are focusing on building one up or a combination of both you can also see different events while traveling.

The only problems that remain are the nonsensical way some information is given. Your abilities and support bonuses just don't make clear what they are actually doing and you really need to try things out to see what is good or not as it just writing nonsense like does a large amount or gigantic amount of damage is meaningless especially when comparing different skills that can be somewhere between level 1-3 where they get better but see no description change when it comes to damage. You also run into merchants that just say that they have stuff and you can either pay some money to get some thing, some more money to get more things, or pay nothing to be given an item that would have been part of what they can sell for free. I can't understand why anyone thought this was a good idea or something that even makes sense, one of Malt's responses of refusal even seems to be him saying he would need to see the supplies before paying for anything.

Fuga still has good different tactical gameplay and good music, and the sequel hasn't made any large changes but it has made some minor improvements and good additions.

Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1827938823659266120

Improves on the original, which was already one of the better SRPGs I've played, and continues to be heavily designed around the best parts of Fire Emblem 4 and 5.

Vestaria Saga II manages to improve on the original, which was already one of the better SRPGs I've played, and continues to be heavily designed around the best parts of Fire Emblem 4 and 5 with the story focusing on multiple war fronts and family and political relations and the large maps offering a variety of side and varied objectives.

There are a lot of memorable stages in the game with one of the best having you assault a fort heavily defended by accurate and heavily damaging ballistae with a variety of other units supporting the inside and outside defenses of the fort. What and how quickly you do certain things can effects how easy or difficult the battle becomes. If you saved a character in a previous chapter the battle starts asking you to pick from two characters to support you with one being able to destroy northern ballistae and the other having a staff that can silence enemy mages armed with with long range status effecting spells. Getting through the northern ballistae with a ranged or flying unit by making use of characters with magic that can give characters an extra turn or just by trying to dodge or tank a ballistae hit or two can allow them to destroy three engineer units across a river trying to repair it so enemy cavalry can get across to flank your army, with the units leader being someone who can be turned into an ally later. If you destroy all the engineers before they can repair the bridges the cavalry has to retreat. Intercepting a shipment of gold stops the fort leader from paying his powerful mercenary guards he surrounds himself with who will leave him. Killing a unit occupying a town to deliver people to a group of demons in the hills will prevent the demons from aiding the fort. Killing the knight occupying another town quickly enough will free the families of a group of farmers being forced into joining the forts militia and will have them either never spawn as enemies or if they have spawned as enemies will cause them to flee the map. The southern ballistae will hit and kill almost anything they fire at but just because of a named unit with high stats and a passive command skill increasing the accuracy of the other artillery units, fighting your way through a group of assassins in the corner of the map leads you to their fort where you can pay them to sneak in and assassinate that artillery commander.

Even the usual terrible end game is made more interesting here. In something like a Fire Emblem game you often get some awful chapter where you fight the evil dragon god by attacking it with your lord/lords newly acquired super weapons in what is usually a very poorly thought out or arena like stage. Here you still attack the evil dragon god with your lord's newly acquired super weapon but the dragon is taking up 1/5 of the map, in a map that is bigger than most Fire Emblem maps. The dragon has multiple horn, scale, tail, leg, etc parts that can all have their own attacks and ranges. You are attempting to hold out for the lord character to arrive while defending three different NPC characters (a fourth one doesn't need defending) who each have their own armies of NPC defending them already all while a large army is amassing to the south of you but that you can get to kill off 1/3 of their numbers and temporarily put another 1/3 to sleep with different actions. It is a very easy map if you have kept certain NPCs alive and made a certain decision at an earlier point that will give you powerful characters to control to defend an area you would otherwise have to quickly run a group across the map to defend but is a much more interesting ending than most games in this genre get.

It being a sequel with many returning characters it handles the power of the characters in the best way I think possible. The level cap is just 30, promoting does nothing but gives you additional stats boosts based on the class and can slightly raise some stat caps but most units don't even promote because they come in their advanced form. If they are in their advanced form they take an XP penalty from battles. Most of your characters start off as promoted units just with a lower level and more stats to gain but you get access to a lot of abilities right from the start and the larger variety of weapons those promoted classes can equip(you start off with the swordmaster who can wield swords and great swords who can attack first while defending, possibly land an additional hit for every attack he makes, and who gets an increased critical hit chance, and who also starts with a terminal illness doing 1 damage to him every turn).

In addition to the various characters to recruit narratively, by capturing them, or by fulfilling certain conditions there is a large number of side characters that you can keep alive by doing different actions in battles or making different decisions when choices come up who may come back to aid you in later chapters or show up in story events with their roles or other side characters living or dying based on who you keep alive. Sometimes doing something that gets a character killed might both be mechanically easier and also get you their equipment to use but might cause you to face other enemy units later, while saving them might have them giving you items or teaching you a passive skill as well as showing up to join you or as an NPC leading other NPC characters later on in large battles. Even the characters that join you are split into different groups automatically or based on who you choose to send to each stage and some leave your party to join other characters and wars that are being fought by your allies from the previous game. Near the end when one character leaves another will go with her but if you had gotten her killed earlier on then you would be be able to keep the other character for the remaining chapters.

Even with the limitations of it being a freely available game in Japan and with a limited number of people working on it the soundtrack is still very good and while the animations and artwork isn't the most detailed the character portraits remain good and the attack animations flowing into different attacks when you are able to get off more than one attack usually still looks a lot better than some of the more repetitive animations of similar titles. There are some limitations to the design, the same ones the first game had, the resolution is low, hitting F4 is the only way to fullscreen the game, there is no Steam cloud save support or achievements, it crashes every now and then, the ESC key will close the game if you are playing on the keyboard and expecting that to open menus, using a controller works well enough but it doesn't always respond to lighter stick movements in some directions that should be more than enough to move the cursor and is in other directions. Mechanically as good as the design can be for a lot of the stages it was good to see a change to being able to save whenever you want as opposed to every five turns like in the previous game, there are a lot of events or things you can activate that will completely screw you over if you didn't know what was going to happen or if you are just trying to do things like capturing certain characters for recruitment and trying to weaken instead of kill them.

Hopefully Kaga continues to work on the other two games in the series and they also see an official translation.

Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1820355080232833423

An entertaining 2-4 player co-op platformer where the group is chained together and has to escape from hell by climbing out. Physics of the chain don't always make sense but it is a good enough gimmick to make for a mostly enjoyable game but the stage design becomes more visually interesting but dull and simple mechanically in the last 1/3 of the game.

As you climb you start to change environments from settings like hell, to city rooftops, temples, ruins, etc. There are areas to climb, traps, rotating and disappearing blocks, objects to bounce off of, vehicle driving segments, and minor puzzles and mazes. What tends to be the most interesting are parts that want you to make use of your chains, such as dangling a player over the edge to hit buttons on the side of a platform or having the group slit to opposites sides of a slanted pipe to slide down while avoid obstacles above it, unfortunately there aren't too many situations like this. If someone falls of a cliff and other members of the group are on solid ground they can face that player and attempt to pull the chain up to keep the group safe, though the chain pulling can be strange at times and not always work well, forward momentum or the group all moving in the same direction can also pull fallen players back up.

Depending on the difficulty you can either load fairly frequent checkpoints or you can play where you have to continue from where you fell down to, which can be all the way to the start of the game from the highest point.

Played with a combination of two and three players.

Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1808748003072880842

Good expansion to the original Baldur's Gate that adds some positive features and elements from games that came later but hurts itself with mostly poor main plot and an ending that wants to but can't be continued in BG2.

Covers what happened between the aftermath of Baldur's Gate and your group's capture in the opening of Baldur's Gate 2. Your party from the first game tracks down the remaining allies of your half-brother Sarevok in the prologue before many of your friends and allies go their separate ways while you remain in the city with Imoen as the Hero of Baldur's Gate. One night assassins attack you and Imoen and are found to have been sent by the forces of an army of crusaders lead by an Aasimar who believes she is supported by many of the gods in her attempt to enter hell to free the lost souls of those who died in the recent Dragonspear War. Her army has been destroying villages and forces in her way leading to a massive influx of refugees fleeing to Baldur's Gate.

Good handling of characterization with Khalid, Jaheira, Imoen, and Safona and some funny new lines from Minsc. The main character's dialogue choices feel in line with the original game with your character offing being able to act as a mixture of a good helpful person, mercenary looking out for themselves, over the top villain, or a player acting out his lines in a tabletop RPG that they might be long past the point of being tired of playing in. Helps to tie things into BG2 and ToB, Imoen leaves the group to study magic having her multi class mage build make sense narratively in the next game, fleshes out Bhaal and Cyric a bit more. Has your character get some of the recognition they should be getting from allies and enemies as the hero of Baldur's Gate. Has some positive aspects from games newer than the original such as characters speaking to each other more often as you travel or commenting on areas you enter, a storage chest for equipment that follows your army camp around in between chapters, you can handle some companion quests just by talking to them in camp without needing them in your party just to go acquire items, some quests have multiple ways to solve them or easier ways depending on what companions are in your party, charisma or intelligence stats of the person talking, or talking to someone as a certain class or race might offer unique options. The returning characters have new voice lines for their conversations and new combat barks and react to things with lines that they previously wouldn't like trying to overfill their inventory or critical hits and misses, the exception to this being Jaheira whose voice actress stopped acting around 2002 and has no new voiced lines. At no point were enemy mages casting lightning bolt in tiny dungeon passages and rooms in a way that could kill themselves, their allies, and half your party like they were obsessed with doing in BG1. Some items you can acquire can be brought into the world of BG2 with some of them just being something you might want to use in general and some being helpful or more helpful for a certain class you might be playing like Shaman or Archer. Good music that feels similar to the style of the other IE games.

It wants to do the post Neverwinter Nights Bioware thing with big army battles and endings, and actually does a better job than any of the Dragon Age or Mass Effect games did but with an engine that doesn't really support large combats well with how some spells work and with the engine's pathfinding issues. Antagonist with some sympathetic qualities but a stupid out of place plan for the world that never really shows a good reason why so many would follow her and the generically treacherous advisor hurt the main plot but the terrible rushed feeling ending that can't even be addressed in BG2 since it was made first (outside of a fan mod) really hurts the entire endgame. It would have been nice if the final chapter of the game saw you fighting in hell and dealing with different devils or remaining elements of the crusader army or how your party members take being brought into hell instead of just being a five minute walk before getting to an end boss and meaningless new side character. Depending on classes characters will level up only 1-2 times over the course of this game, though because level ups in the older D&D games don't really come with much or anything in the way of options or new abilities this doesn't really hurt the experience.

Kept the series tradition alive of having you spend almost no time in Baldur's Gate except for the short opening that locks off most of the city.

Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1797334794331996591

Dark Descent is a real time strategy game where you control a squad of 4-5 marines completing a variety of objectives to escape from a planet now overrun by aliens, a cult, experimented on humans, and enemy soldiers while using a damaged troop carrier, the USS Otago, as a base where you can manage your Colonial Marines and research upgrades.

The prologue of the game has you controlling a Weyland Yutani administrator who escapes a station that has been overrun with aliens after she activates a quarantine procedure that destroy an escaping infestation and another ship while heavily damaging and grounding the Otago, a troop carrier whose personnel rescue her. Both her and the marines attempt to quarantine the outbreak while saving as many people on the planet as they can while trying to find a way to escape the planet and bypass the satellites that will shoot down anything that passes low orbit.

Mission have you choosing and equipping between 1-5 marines of five available classes and completing a variety of primary and secondary objectives on locations like derelict ships, space stations, research bases, alien hives, dockyards, corporate offices, destroyed living spaces, etc. While the missions are linear in their progression you can go back to areas you have been to before to gather supplies or find missing datapads, though it should never be necessary. At any point that you are able to reach the vehicle that deploys with your marines you can choose to extract your squad to refill ammo, supplies, and possibly switch out marines if yours have been wounded or traumatized. Stress can build up while under attack or hunted that can raise trauma levels and give each marine a variety of passive penalties until they spend time with a psychologist on the ship, on the normal difficulty this never happened for me. As in most games like this, depending on the amount of damage a marine suffers they will have to spend a certain number of days in the medbay before that can be deployed again. For ever doctor that you start with on staff or rescue during missions or during random end day events you can use one to lower the time needed to recover for a marine by one day, even using multiple on the same character. Certain wounds can also lead to penalties in a mission until healed or might lead to a body part needing a prosthetic, thought I never did have anyone lose a body part. Going on a mission will also cause a marine to become tired, to lose that status they have to sit out the next mission or they will have a penalty to their bravery (stress defense) and accuracy. Going on a mission while tired will cause them to become exhausted which will now force them to rest for two days.

While on a mission your marines constantly move as one group, though depending on where everyone is in their formation you might have only one who is in a position to be spotted by an enemy or who has a line of sight on a target. Once an enemy engages them they will all automatically attack targets but you can set priority targets be clicking on an enemy or engage a target that has not engaged you yet by clicking on them. You can pause or slow time down (depending on the option chosen in the gameplay settings) to bring up a list of commands that allow you to use special abilities or special weapons and gadgets you have equipped at the cost of command points. You get four command points that slowly recharge over time to do things like having a soldier use suppressing fire to slow enemy advance at the chosen angle, use a weapon like a shotgun, flamethrower, or sniper rifle, set a mine up, set up a motion tracker that can be activated to lure enemies in, throw a flare to increase accuracy in its AoE, etc. In addition to command actions you can also order marines use equipped gear like medkits, tools to seal a door or to hack or repair things in the environment, to set up or reload sentry guns, or to use ammo to reload their own guns or to set up explosives to blow up weakened walls. Certain rooms are marked as potential safe areas and completely sealing a room allows you to rest which will lower stress and may have other effects depending on the classes and skills of your marines.

The way that everyone moves as a squad both works very well while also creating problems. On one hand it makes things simple to control most of the time, I never once had anyone get caught or stuck in the environment or running some different path from everyone else, etc. On the other it can make using cover or hiding awkward when suddenly one person isn't quiet able to fit on a cover spot. Formations options to change how people are standing would have been nice as having no control frequently has the person equipped with the tool you need standing in a spot that isn't fitting for the situation. Your marine with the flamethrower and shotgun might be behind everyone, your recon class you typically would want in front is somewhere else, your most wounded character isn't standing near the center where it is safter and keeps moving to the frontline, etc. Interacting with objects will typically have the closest person run over to do it before they rejoin the squad when they are done, this is usually fine but you might have a more combat focused character suddenly trying to open a door, or it just assumes you want your tech guy to drive the power loader or medic to extract samples from an enemy body when they might be one of your most combat effective character or equipped or injured in a way where you don't want them doing that.

There are five classes a marine can become once they hit level three and lose their generic rookie class. The most useful classes that I always had one of was the Sergeant and Recon classes. A Sergeant increases your command points by one, lowers the recovery time of command points, and has an ability that prevents stress from increasing for 30 seconds at the cost of one command point. Having a sergeant meant I never had to worry about stress after the first few missions and always had better access to my most useful abilities. A Recon class makes the squad move a little faster and has a variety of what I found useless gadgets to track enemies on top of the motion sensor you already have, what they also have is the most useful thing in the game which was a silenced sniper rifle that they can use as soon as they become a recon class. Spending a command point to aim an instant and silent kill shot at lone enemies combined with the use of your motion tracking and ability to hide in cover really opens up stealth options that can see you having a much easier time getting through missions in one attempt as you avoid being hunted or increasing alien aggression as those hunts build up. They also allow you to exploit many of the encounters with groups of human enemies where you can just snipe them without engaging in the fairly poor gun battles you can get into. The Gunner could easily be the remaining 2-3 spots in your squad. The gunner has access to the smartgun that holds more ammo, fires faster, and can be set up as it's own sentry on top of the dedicated sentry guns you have while your gunner fights with their secondary weapon. They make the entire squad better at suppression fire for each one in the squad and get a passive bonuses to getting dismembering or critical hits on enemies. Like in most strategy games Medics have a variety of skills for helping you a bad situation that you probably could have avoided if you brought someone along who wasn't a medic. The best thing about them is that this is finally a game where just having one of them on your team can lower after time required to spend in the medbay by 30%, making them much better than XCOMs medics. The final class is the Tecker which the game makes almost useless for some reason...

Full Review: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Kennan/review/1651018/

Genopanic is a competently made action platformer with music, sound effects, and visuals that give off a good atmosphere, it has responsive controls that a lot of indie platformers can lack, and it changes things up often with the introduction of new abilities and items. But it is also very short, taking me under three hours to finish, it plays a bit more like you are in a tutorial for at least 2/3s of the game, and while some enemies can look cool or add to a somewhat creepy atmosphere they pose no real threat.

You play as a robot tasked with going to a quarantined planet to recover illegally modified creatures called GMOs with the help of your virtual assistant Laik. After you land and take a train to the facility you find it full of mutated creatures of what were formerly scientists, dangerous hazards, an AI that doesn't want you there, and you find that the GMOs have escaped to different sections of the area. Each section of the facility tends to have its own kind of biome from a section that is more covered in green and has some spiderlike enemies, an area with pipes shooting fire and lava rising, an area with water that you need to find valves to raise or lower the water level, ice sections where you can slide on some types of floor, etc. There's not too much of a story to uncover as many of the notes you can find on dead scientists or computers is more of the referential humor or ridiculous messages between characters rather than adding much to an overall plot. The station AI Volga you don't spend much time with and most of your enjoyment there is how much you like busty cat girls. Your doglike assistant Laik is frequently talking and has a few funny lines but better than that are some great expressions he gives in more surprising or dire moments.

The game has a good visual style that both makes you want to see how new locations and enemies look while also highlighting hazards and where you should be heading next effectively. Although the game has an easy to follow map, locations that allow for backtracking, and you find new abilities as you play that are common in metroidvania style games this is primarily a linear game where you will take a path allowed by your current abilities and then move onto the next natural section as you gain a new skill or a plot moment changes something on the map or your current location. Even those areas formerly blocked off for you are typically gotten back to by tacking a roundabout path or a new path found after gaining equipment, this makes it so you are unlikely to do much backtracking.

As you play you will find new weapons and equipment that can be used to access formerly blocked paths. Some of the weapons you find such as a flamethrower allow you to burn through paths formerly blocked by spiders, an ice gun can destroy molten rocks, your main gun can allow you to hit and destroy explosive crates from a safe distance, gadgets like a gravity gun lets you move and launch heavy crates, and gaining gravity boot to slow your fall and the abilities to double jump and to dash left and right at a fast speed that can carry you over cliffs give you new options to navigate your environment. Some weapons are more effective against certain enemy types, being able to kill some almost immediately and possibly while removing hazards created from their deaths. For example, the ice gun can instantly kill flaming enemies while preventing the explosion caused by other weapons. You can quickly swap through your weapons with a controller's shoulder buttons and dash with the right trigger or Y and everything is fast and responsive, though you do have an energy bar that can limit the use of some of your abilities and weapons until you allow the bar to recharge.

One of the main elements of the game is the crumbling infrastructure where you will frequently see walls or run over floors that will break on impact that can open up paths that allow you to bypass hazards or blockages to continue through the area. The idea of this is interesting, but nothing really comes of it. You will just learn that if an area looks like you can't get through it to look for the wall with the visual differences to highlight that you can go through it, a laser is blocking your path you can dash over it and through the next wall. There was likely going to be more to this at one point. When you enter a wall there is kind of a "fog of war" effect in the area where you ability to see the entire section or only sections you have moved through could have been used to hide enemies and hazards. It feels like that probably was the idea at one point as it seems like that would be the thought behind it and the reason from some of the areas with more space to them, but I would imagine it was discovered that running through partially visually blocked off areas and suddenly running into an enemy or instant death hazard isn't actually much fun and probably really frustrating. Running through or into the walls or ceilings just kind of becomes something you do to get around and get used to. It's not good, bad, or something that provides much in the way of unique challenge or interestingly utilized mechanics, it just how you get around. If some games would have stacked some blocks so you could just jump over something, maybe here you fall through the floor to walk under it instead.

The game is quite easy. Your main challenge will come from platforming while avoiding some instant death lasers/fire/etc but even those sections tend to be simpler than a lot of similar and popular games. While there are a variety of enemy types, with some having good designs for the atmosphere, most enemies are far too docile to provide any kind of challenge. The average enemy can be easily avoided, charged and hit with your sword, or just shot from a distance that prevents them from even attacking you. Even some of the stronger enemies can do nothing to you if you hit them first or just wait until they turn around before engaging them as they might not even react to being hit from behind. Even the few bosses, that again look good visually, just aren't good at actually attacking you. Attacking enemies feels fine, there is a bit of weight to your blows and the impact of attacks. There were two or three times in the game, all where I believe I was moving through some series of instant kill laser traps, where I thought that this might be the kind of much longer section you would find in a moderately challenging area of a similar kind of game, only here the sections probably only lasted for the time it took me to have that thought. Because of how quickly you are finding new abilities the first 2/3s of the game can feel almost tutorial like as you run into sections made to get you used to the new item you picked up and are still seeing graffiti on walls with text like dash here or messages from Laik telling you what to do.

If you want a short and fairly relaxing platformer where you can take it easy and enjoy the visuals and music (and Laik's expressions) or are just getting into or getting someone else into the genre and want something simpler then this is a solid title that does the actual movement and ability use well while still making it fun to hit enemies with your attacks. If you want a deep story to uncover, a long or challenging game, or something more unique mechanically then you probably want to hold off.

Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1790559795394777554

(Was given a free key for the game through the Steam curator system)

A unique RPG with good art and music, good moments more fitting for a slice of life style story, interesting mechanics that aren't utilized enough, and incompetently designed but easy and fairly infrequent combat.

The main plot is hurt quite a bit by the fast pacing and somewhat nonsensical opening that bristles against the main more serious plot that it doesn't take the time or have the quality of writing to deal with in any meaningful way. With how quickly you are rushed into the main narrative you have no build up about the state of the world and no time spent working with the people in the army you begin the game being part of or seeing anything that could appear to give them any kind of sensible personalities based on their training and indoctrination.

You are part of an army of soldiers that have been born and raised in an underground high tech facility and trained to be soldiers since birth, all under the orders of a Father General who says their goal is to keep peace throughout the world. You've been trained as a sniper all your life and when the sniper of a more elite unit is injured you are assigned to take his place and join others on what ends up being a false flag operation where you pose as Polish soldiers attacking Russian civilians in small towns in order to start a war because your leader seems to want to be part of an invasion of Poland. Everyone knows you are killing civilians, except your character (mixture of night vision scope, lack of understanding about outside world, indoctrination explaining why he doesn't notice he's shooting unarmed random people in a town I guess), which as the the sniper and by extension the person who should be the most likely to be a psychopathic murderer that raises a lot of strange and never answered questions. Did they suspect you would have some personality flaw towards their goals if so why did they assigned you, why would they keep you as a sniper, did they not train any other snipers, why did they even need a sniper or a particularly talented one in this situation, why is everyone else ok with this when its most of their first assignment when they seem to have similar personalities to you, etc. It doesn't help that all of this seems to be completely contradicted by the shared briefing you had with the other soldiers, some early tutorial like lines in the opening area are also wrong as they reflect former mechanics that were changed over the early access period the game was in. You and another soldier you convince to join you flee the army after your first mission.

When you fight your old army many of them do seem to be portrayed more as the psychopathic characters they should be, but nearly everyone you meet at the start of the game is bumbling anime cliches like, "Can you bring me a gift from the surface," "lol my medical supplies weren't assigned correctly and I was excited and didn't bother to check," "Guard duty is boring can you bring me some cookies and apples?" You have people who should be closer to the Kurt Russell Soldier film and often are when it wants you to fight them, but seem more on the Forrest Gump side for the opening. Your two early characters also have no difficulty interacting with others or personality conflicts from their upbringing other than trying to make amends for being with the army in the opening and some repeated confusion over food. It's kind of like Tales of Arise's plot of, "Ok we freed the people who have been starving worked to death mining slaves for 100s of years...no other issues to deal with from that everything is fine now." 22+ years of indoctrination and it takes about five minutes to go, well everything we've ever been told must be a lie, we had better shoot them.

Combat involves the worst of the genres kind of buffs, debuffs, and lack of information. Each character has four stats and while ATK and DEF are usually pretty obvious you get no information on what AGI (turn order, dodge, hit, multiple attacks, etc?) or LUK (crit, hit, dodge, skill influence, bit of everything, after battle rewards, basically nothing, etc?) do. Combat follows a shown turn order, except when it decides it doesn't want to follow it. Many of the game's skills are worthless. Skills that cost SP may say they do more damage but then do less damage than a basic attacks. Buffs are often the useless kind of, my attack does 80 damage, if I instead use my attack buff skills by spending SP I sacrifice one turn to do 90 damage for my next three turns. Lynn is easily the best combat character in the game because she has more useful skills including one that can damage and blind all enemies and because the second gun you get for her shoots twice and only checks if the attack hits the one time. When you find an upgrade for your first gun it is worse than the second even with the higher damage, when you find her last gun after that it is still worse even with a high attack and agility bonus. The second gun says nothing about attacking twice and with the lower agility bonus compared to the last gun doesn't even make sense that it would attack twice. Keeping this gun has her often doing more damage than your sniper even when he's equipped with the game's most hidden and high attack value weapon. During combat you can aim at different parts of a targets body with torso shots being more accurate but less damaging, arms forgetting to mention an armor value but having a chance to paralyze (so low you have almost no reason to ever aim there), and head shots deal a lot more damage but have a high evasion chance (no idea what that means and since you rarely miss I would suggest never aiming for anything else, unless they have low enough health to finish with a torso shot or it makes sense to try for to paralyze based on turn order). After most battles you can choose a reward of either getting an item or equipment piece or regenerating some SP, the item and equipment is the better choice 95% of the time since most characters don't even have useful skills. Luckily combat isn't a constant focus of the game and it is so easy that it is never a challenge.

The areas where the game does a better job that can make it worth a playthrough is the good visuals with some nice environment details and some good CGs and animated moments. The music is good throughout the game from story tracks, exploration tracks, and battle tracks. The writing as the characters spend time with each other and interact with others is good and makes it fairly obvious that the developer's talent would lie much more in writing and working on a kind of slice of life story or civilians dealing with the situation of being in a war or civil war rather than the main plot dealing with former soldiers and civilians taking up arms against an army trying to gain control of the world and if the combat was replaced by dialogue choices and activities. Based on side quests you complete and your choices in different conversations characters can gain morale and while it can't have too massive of an effect on the game based on the smaller scale of it you can see some different fates for characters in their final scenes, different scenes or lines between characters, and may gain access to a few different quests if morale is high or low enough.

You are going to be spending more time seeing likable characters interact and doing side activities and that does push the game into an area where I can somewhat recommend it in spite of the poor combat and areas that shouldn't have been the focus.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1789401810634973206