Recent reviews by Naxza

The falling sand engine is a neat way to re-envision the threat of flowing creeper, but it comes with a truly atrocious performance hit AND terrible story to boot. It IS fun to carve out spaces to redirect reservoirs of creeper goop, and it's fun to watch in- well, I can't really call it real time, it gets pretty slideshowy. 'Sides that, it's still creeper world - small fighter (cannons) hold back thin goop, missile ships (mortars) ignore walls if there's pathing to the point of attack, nullifiers break emitters, spirit ships (strafers) counteract digitalis, etc.
I'm not too fussed about the limitation put on quantity of ships (you can override this with Free Build Mode) as it did foster some creative thinking, but it does remove resource tension once you've put your reactors in a safe place. Put ship by green ore, build all reactors, slam out your coil ships (beams for spore emitters) before you get evaporated, then figure out how to play the level. Repeat.

I can't recommend it. The performance is too poor and interrupts the novelty of the engine, and the story might genuinely be better if all the dialogue was stripped out. Creeper Worlds 3 and 4 are better choices

It's actually a themepark MMO. Kill small groups of things around a level for green rocks and town faction points so you can make a Worn Crappygun. Enemies never drop their weapons and they're all bullet sponges. Looting is mostly pointless unless you need bullets, since you'll never find a new gun or attachments or anything particularly interesting.

And, well, it's ugly.

I guess you can do PVP against the other faction, but I'm not really sure what you'd get out of it?

On the bright side, it IS free, so give it a whirl if you're pondering.

It's about six hours long. Some balance is a little wonky (drill armor/fuel is usually a pretty binary 'you touch that rock and die' or 'you cannot be hurt'), there's spelling mistakes (lens enchancer), some of the upgrades come much too late to be useful (bundled grenades), performance tanks after a while because of all the gadgets you have running to eat planets, and there's really no replayability.

Oh, and achievements don't work at all on Linux.

Still, it's fun for eight bucks, and the core gameplay loop is sound. Pony up and burn an afternoon.

It's peculiar and uncanny and richly atmospheric. It's a shooter to make you feel, not through shootouts, or heavy storytelling, but through the uncanny world, aberrations of flesh and humanity, and how you navigate it.

Up front- heed the content warnings on the store page. You might see some stuff.

It wears the trappings of GZDoom but both hides it gracefully and utilizes it handily- sure, enemies path like the do in Doom, and the map is familiar when you press tab, but the way the engine and the player handles gives great strength to the metroidvania style Vomitoreum angles for. Your character is nimble, and incrementally moreso as you find new tools, without ever feeling slippery or unfair. Occasionally you'll make the rounds through a large room you've already cleared before in search of some new path the last upgrade you snagged might allow you, but it never feels like a chore to do so. There is some openness about how you approach some areas depending on which upgrades you have, which is really neat.

The plot is... somewhat grotesque, but that's why you're here, isn't it? It's astonishing how well that's relayed through environment and enemy design. Yeah, there's some nudity and some enemies resemble jubbly bits, but it's not done for the sake of nudity, or shock value, or to be flat-out vulgar; there's an atmospheric storytelling aspect to it. Vomitoreum takes familiar human forms and bits and corrupts them like the world you're made to traverse. To say more than that is to dabble with spoilers, so all I'll conclude with is that it all works really well.

The shooty bits exist. I'm not especially wowed or moved with how they feel. You might spam click a bit much with the pistol for the first couple of bosses. Ordinary enemies are interesting enough in that they all hit hard and incentivize being careful about combat encounters (since there's no quicksave or world health pickups, you have to heal at save points), and particularly sticky situations may encourage the player to go seek out extra health upgrades. It works to fill the space you navigate. Enemy designs are interesting, as mentioned above, and you'll encounter new ones regularly. I've just, I dunno, played in the ZDoom/GZDoom for over a decade now and Vomitoreum doesn't introduce anything new in this regard. And that's okay! It holds up and is interesting enough to move me through the game so I can see the rest of the bizarre world splayed out before me.

I do need to gush and praise the music and sound design- the ambient sound is spot-on in every location, uneasy and uncanny. Fleshy things make excellent fleshy noises, audio effects are crisp and fitting. Grab a pair of headphones, this is a good part of getting engrossed in the world. It's very similar in my opinion to the audio design in Hellpoint, which captures similar emotions very well (but, well, less squishy).

The game is short- maybe three hours long for a casual player, up to five if you're thorough or pace yourself, or go to replay it to pick up on ambient storytelling cues you looked past before you'd digested the plot. It's an artistic experiential thing you get to interface directly with for the price of a movie ticket, and while the dollars-to-hours ratio may not seem great, it's a hell of an experience to kill an evening with.

Go buy it if you like atmospheric boomer shooters. Buy it for the atmosphere and the premise. Buy it for ten bucks. Take a stroll through uncanny valley.

Honestly, I don't know why I'd bother. Wanna do 4x? Go grab X3. Build your own ships? Avorion does it neatly. Explore the galaxy? No Man's Sky. Wanna mine ore nodes and loot points of interest? 7 Days to Die.

After spending a few hours drilling out resource nodes, I couldn't bear to wait another 26 minutes for my pre-fabricated small vessel to cook in the 'factory.' Keeping a few constructors operating while juggling measly resource piles, occasionally getting bitten by a spider which lethally envenoms you unless you find Fire Cave Moss or somesuch somewhere in some world to craft antitoxin.

The game is stupid and gummy to run around in- you'll slide off stuff, you'll jump ineffectually at stuff, you'll break your ankles trying to jump three tiles down, you'll bang into everything with whichever vehicle you're piloting. Animations look bad everywhere. The shooty bits don't even feel real- try the assault rifle, it's pathetic. Pap pap pap pap pap.

You're going to fight the interface more than you are any enemies, too - there's an item logistics submenu hidden in the items menu, and if you want to configure specific systems within a ship or a base, you need to press P to bring up that menu, which allows you to, say, choose the fuel access hatch, which you then plop your fuel nuggets into. You're going to craft the wrong thruster for your hoverbike, because there's two types of Small Thruster and one is specifically for hoverbikes and one is for small vehicles and your hoverbike is not a small vehicle, and then you're going to need to associate your thruster-to-be with the hoverbike and not 'generally wherever' or your base or whatever you happen to be closest to and be helpfully told 'Check the tooltip to see why you can't place this or press N to associate/dissociate this block with other things. Oh yeah, N brings up another menu specifically for block placement. Remember your toggles.

Hey, while we're talking about pressing keys- did you know the pause button is bound to the Pause button? Go find that on your keyboard.

I just couldn't bring myself to spend more time squabbling in the dirt to eventually plunge the mysteries of the galaxy. It's just not fun.

It's, well, it's not a great survival game. It takes generally too long to get from point A to B, re-crafting tools is kind of annoying, most tasks and objectives are superficial at best, and the food/water meters may as well not exist for how glacially they move and how abundant that stuff is in the wreckage everywhere.

Whole thing's built on stupid, slapstick, self-referential, fourth-wall-breaking humor delivered in snippets delivered by your voiced spacesuit. Every major and minor bit of wreckage has something to quip about, the plot is frequently absurd. There's frequent homages to other survival or scifi games (finding Commander Shepard stuck in 'the textures,' for example, or several allusions to Subnautica). Breathedge is just absolutely serious about not taking itself seriously.

Look, your spacesuit booster is powered by farts. I don't know what else to tell you.

Anyways, I found it funny, and the best way to describe the game is that the loose survival mechanics serve as touchstones to get you between funny things. Not great if you want survival to be the forte, or if you're impatient, but if shooting a rocket full of mayo at a singularity to reduce its radiation output while you fart around on a vacuum-cleaner-turned-jetbike sounds like your sort of atmosphere, Breathedge is probably worth picking up when it goes on discount.

Control is to the SCP Foundation what Doctor Strange is to the occult- offering tantalizing glimpses into a world where science and ritual grapple firsthand with the inexplicable, localized within a building that simultaneously has always existed but regularly changes. Well, in lore, anyways. Unfortunately, these tasty ideological morsels lack the nutritive substance to satisfy the maddening itch left when trying to grapple with the ineffable. This makes it approachable, for sure, but makes one yearn to leap across the threshold instead of leaning past it, as Control does.

Visually, it's a treat- cement crumbles as you pluck chunks suitable as a psionic projectile out of the wall, dust and papers fly as you shatter a table. Lights flicker and smoke heaves as you clip electronics and hurl explosives as you fight the Nasty Red Dudes. If you've ever dreamt of seeing your local cubicle farm violently undone in glorious combat, Control may draw a tear to your eye.

Speaking of glorious combat, Control, well, falls a little short. It's quick, it's precise, each combat experience offers are handful of useful things to shoot, lob, hide behind, duck around, or whatever. It handles pretty well, too, and handles healing by dropping nougaty blue goodness from slain foes so you're never fiddling around with curatives or waiting for your eyes to stop bleeding /shields to recharge, or whatever. It just plays its hand early and never elaborates or evolves- gameplay gets a little samey, frankly. It's snug, and it works well enough, but stops being interesting pretty early on.

The RPG elements are somewhat superficial and tacked-on, in my experience. Periodically you're interrupted with side alerts to go clear someplace you've already been again for nominal rewards, the likes of which (along with other mostly meaningless macguffins you just acquire from chests and combat) can be used to craft player and weapon mods that offer benefits like -%25 launch power cost or +%30 gatling sidearm fire rate or other mostly uninteresting boons. Control could lose the alerts, lose the side-quests available at any save point (kill five mooks in 'someplace else' with 'gun in shotgun mode' for 'tier 3 player mod' for example) and would absolutely not detract from the experience. Plus there's a linear skill tree with ability points you can allocate- unfortunately there's almost no choice offered here except direct "increase to power strength" sorts of things, so despite completing all content, I never felt it necessary re-spec allocated points.

Really, my gripe is that Control plays it too safely. It's hardly even superficially scary, or existential, or mind-baffling, all ideologies you'd crash into if you played into it. The most unnerving enemy you'll 'fight' is an immortal strobe-light koosh ball, and the most interesting boss fight is either some tentacles or a bigger koosh ball that spews clocks at you. There's enough imagination to bring the idea of a paranatural facility facing an existential threat to bear, but not enough to really bring it to life, y'know? It's a perfectly palatable AAA experience that fails to be bold.

Despite all this criticism, I do still recommend the game. It's overall a satisfying experience with an interesting premise, excellent voice acting, personable characters, and a savoury sneak-peek at what a world with Altered World Events and paranatural abilities might look like (along with all the bureaucratic trappings a federal department allocated to its management). It's well presented, well-performing, well-handling, and absolutely level-headed.

I'd estimate the two DLC each allot some 4-7 hours of gameplay, and while they don't remix any of the above, it's more of what you enjoyed, if you enjoyed it, so casually recommend the Ultimate Edition as well.

Find it on sale for fifteen bucks. Buy it.

Teardown is a heist game first and foremost. You wield carnage like a scalpel, carving the best path between objectives and your escape vehicle. Your goal- to secure as many objectives as possible and escape all within one minute.

Occasionally you're tasked with the total deconstruction of a large structure, and that's plenty more freeform than described as above, but primarily, you're heisting.

Hulk-chuck crates to bust holes in walls where your trusty sledgehammer fails, or take the Durandal approach to architecture by blowing through obstacles with your trusty shotgun. Build bridges with planks, tether objects with cables, slap jet boosters on a forklift, or blow it all to hell with a rocket launcher. Where there's a will, there's the means, and the means are really, really fun.

Most of the time you're designing the ideal route to hit macguffins and then escape, and you're provided ample tools to do that with- a neato overhead view of the level, some handy yellow spraypaint to draw route lines with (and boy howdy are you going to fall back on your route lines when stuff hits the fan), platforming tools, myriad explosives to reshape the architecture to fit your needs. Too much detritus? Have a leafblower. Things on fire? Here's the fire extinguisher (and boy are the particle effects on the extinguisher pretty.) Every level has neato jubblies scattered about for you to scoop up and fence, funding upgrades to each of your tools- pack more explosives, render larger holes with your shotgun, extend the length of your planks, and so on. Destruction purely for inspiration tends to reveal cleverly-hidden goodies to line your wallet with.

It oozes character and the engine behaves marvelously. Long as you go in knowing it's a heist game and not a wild carnage simulator, you'll have the time of your life. Buy it, topple a few buildings, steal some cars- but preferably in Teardown, please. It's easier to rationalize the machine-gun-bearing helicopter that way.

Don't buy if you're arachnophobic or fear deep water. Absolutely buy if the atmosphere/pacing of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl resonated with you.

Stunning, richly desolate, and overwhelmingly charming/uncanny. Northern Journey is a beautiful composition of the strange and somber bleakness of the far wilderness, measured against a lighthearted and bizarre cast of characters, in a way that's experiential and exploratory. On its face, I guess you'd call it a first person shooter, but you as the player are pulled away from what you know and expect from the genre by making that just a bit clunky and awkward (not you, though- you move nimbly). That sounds like a demerit at face value, but it absolutely totally works and keeps your attention on the environments, the music, on what you're doing and how you're doing it instead of a mechanical challenge to slay 'baddies.'

It's certainly a little janky, sure, and it has some rough edges. None of it's enough to detract from the core experience, but worth considering if you require your games polished to a lustrous sheen. The game is sort of heavy-handed about giving the player clues or directions at each step of the way, but it's easy to see how players would get lost to the detriment of the experience without it, so I'll give it a pass. The worst gameplay related bug I found was that you could mash the jump button while climbing a rope and that'd levitate the player such that you'd fall to your death when the climbing animation finished if you did it for long enough- you could totally avoid doing this, so if it's any indication, the rest of the experience is pretty smooth.

If it's the sort of peculiar explorer/shooter/ambient game you think you'd enjoy, you absolutely totally gotta buy it. Twelve bucks is a steal for the experience. Total playtime is probably 7-12 hours. It's not particularly replayable, but it doesn't need to be- the experience is going to stick with you.

Buy it. Full price is fine.

Fundamental protip to enjoy the game more: Absolutely try the other gamemodes, which means visiting the other worlds for different gear if you're stuck. You're not going to jump the gun or spoil yourself on anything.

You're going to find the final boss, get weird character voiceline cut-ins as it does final boss things, get a whole bunch of annoying pop-ups about the items you get for beating the final boss while you're in its cutscene, and then when you get to the credits, there's no music. At all. Total silence as names float by.

It's a slapdash mess of a story with gameplay hobbled by procedural generation. I do not understand who I was, why I ended up here, why anyone trusted me with the plot macguffins, what time I'm from, why all the computer logs have a systems diagnostic feature that NEVER actually tells you anything useful, what difference I was supposed to make to anyone, and why I crash-landed my boat on post-apocalyptic cityscapes with nothing but a frigging sword and then get handed gear out of a spaghetti western movie. Is there magic? Is there technology? The anachronism in the first arc is stunning! I don't recall why I get to respawn, how I'm intended to get to the other three of six(?!) worlds that bore no importance to the plot besides the Free Play mode, or, at this point, why I'd want to. I don't know even know which damage type is good against what.

On its nose, the pacing is a little bit heavy and plodding in order to be, I dunno, Souls-esque, and that's totally fine, it works. For what the gameplay tries to be, it handles it neatly, and while it's probably a fundamental make-or-break point for why you'd want to play it, Remnant sticks to its character here. Finding new rings and armor (armor sets each have their own set bonuses) is a treat each time, since you have a lot of variety to cater towards your own strengths or creatively utilize bonuses in tandem. Multiplayer just sort of works if you've got a friend or a public lobby- jump in and go, and that's fun. Enemies are all novel and uniquely challenging, there's a lot of great design concepts that went into the mooks you'll churn through. Bosses veer from neat to infuriating depending on your approach or gear- you WILL be challenged to reconsider your approach.

Pacing is just... All over the place, though. You can find a few guns and armor pieces if you poke around at the start, making you think perhaps there's other secret areas like this throughout the rest of the game. There aren't. If you're not so lucky, you won't even get another gun besides the starter ones (or ones you can buy from the other starting classes) until you leave Earth. You'll think you can just go 'find' some more guns out there, but largely, you don't. You'll decide you don't really want to talk to that wrinkly weird old guy, but it turns out exhausting his dialogue is how you get another trinket or the ability to buy another armor set, because the game doesn't tell you anything. Bosses have secret methods to get their macguffins or weapons and you'll never catch on unless you've got a guide or wiki open on your flank. Player expectations are not managed AT ALL. I'm no stranger to the genre, and hell, I've been playing games for decades, but any and all those little indications that 'this is how the game works' or 'this is the effort/reward loop' or 'you probably want to go this way' are all missing. It's not at all intuitive.

The game's rough edges have rough edges, is really as best I can summarize it. It does what it sets out to do just well enough that it might be palatable on sale, if a little sour. I did glean some enjoyment out of it but really, I wouldn't recommend it at all.