Recent reviews by Snack

♥♥♥♥ this game

Really love this game. Have noticed my aim improve quite a bit after playing it just a few times. There are a couple things I'd like fixed:

• The game's almost purely white aesthetic makes my screen blare white into my eyes, and it gets a bit painful to look at the game after a few minutes of gameplay. I have to lower my monitor's brightness specifically for this game, but in turn, doing so makes it a bit harder for me to see my crosshair. It's a lose-lose situation
  
• Would be cool if the game saved more than just your highscore on a level. Would be nice to have stat-screens for every level and difficulty showing things that go on the training report like "Best Accuracy" and "Most Hits", as well as other things like "Average Accuracy" etc...
  
• Leaderboards?
  
• Daily Challenges?
  
• Option to turn off the shooting sound

I have no clue how I keep solving this game.

This game is great! It's a lot of bloody fun to get to control a crowd of zombies and terrorize entire cities. Since it's in early access, there's still room for improvement, but honestly, there's only improvement headed this game's way.

It's difficult to explain the reasons why I recommend Don't Starve. It isn't by any means a perfect game. Hell, it isn't even fun 90% of the time.

When I started up Don't Starve, I was pleasantly surprised to see how the game immediately improved upon Minecraft's tutorial-less design. The game doesn't have a game-to-user tutorial persay, but it teaches the player through it's HUD. Which is excellent. Don't listen to the people complaining that the game lacks a tutorial of any sort. But at the same time, remember that the game expects a lot from you too, and it isn't going to hold your hand. Don't Starve expects you to be smart, which is something we see very few games do these days.

Some of the highlights in Don't Starve for me were crafting a new tool/structure/weapon after having gathered all the appropriate resources, learning what my new toy does, or even finding a new resource on its own and seeing where it's applicable. Sadly, the idea of letting the player have fun through the joy of discovery becomes counter-intuitive, as the game expects you to learn what everything does, and as you gain more experience with the game, you'll encounter new toys to play with less often.

Probably the biggest problem with Don't Starve is the fact that it adopts a rogue-like style and how it expects you to put in a lot of time into one single life. Once again, this is counter-intuitive, as whenever you die (yes, you will), your next life will require you to re-do everything from scratch. To put this into perspective, imagine a book was re-written by an infinite number of authors, each having his own lyrical style, but every author sticked to the story. When you read one of the books and make a mistake reading it, that book is taken from you, and you need to start reading the same story written by a different author from the very beginning. It's more heartbreaking than frustrating when you loose a really good life. This is where Don't Starve fails when compared to other rogue-likes. The problem is that a life in Don't Starve has no limit to how long it can take till it's over, whilst a playthrough of FTL: Faster Than Light or The Binding of Isaac won't take longer than 2 hours. The game's death has meaning, and it's all the worse for it.

Over time, I began to realise exactly what Don't Starve expected of me if I wished to get good at it. After a good amount of deaths, I'd start games extremely panicked, picking up resources as fast as I could without taking a single second to admire the game's beauty. The fact that the game has no difficulty curve whatsoever is why I said in the beginning of the review that it isn't fun 90% of the time. I most certainly wouldn't recommend it for the faint of heart. In my experience, It just gets stressful, and never lets up.

After all the bad I've said about Don't Starve, you can wonder why I still recommend it. Don't Starve is still an overall interesting game, and some of the design choices that have been made in the process of creating this game, be them for better or worse, are extremely noteworthy, and are my reason for why anybody interested in seeing what separates and amazing rogue-like from an okay rogue-like should play this game.
Once again, though. If you're not into extremely punishing games, I highly recommend staying away from this game. It probably just isn't for you.

tl;dr: From the very short amount of time I've spent with Receiver, I'm happy to say that we need to see more games like this.

I never realized how tired I've gotten of pressing square to reload until I actually managed to do so in Receiver. It's a game and a proof-of-concept in and of itself. I really hate saying stuff like this, but after having enough time with the game, I feel that if I were to grab a pistol like the ones portrayed in the game, I would be somewhat familiar.

The setting is interesting. I love the plain, low-poly, randomly generated environments. I feel like I'm playing in a much darker version of the music video for Dire Straits' Money For Nothing. I've noticed a sort of miniature art-movement within 2D indie games lately where everything is pixelart. After playing this, I want to see more 3D indie games look like Receiver and Glitchhikers. Possibly my only gripe is that a seed will sometimes have spawned me into a dark corridor without a flashlight, though I guess this can play into the vulnerability the game will sometimes put you in.

The one song that plays throughout screams Deus Ex: Human Revolution style Cyberpunk! It's very engaging to listen, though after prolonged listening, the song can get old. Sound design is alright. Nothing fancy, but even though the game explains nothing, you'll immedeatly understand what sound queues mean what from the enemy robots and your pistol. It's all very distinct.

I'm interested in the story too. You're tasked with picking up 11 tapes scattered around the map. I like the story, as it's somewhat concerned in actually talking to the player (I'll paraphrase, as I don't know the quote by heart):
"If you receive this message on a fictional level, we cannot reach you"
It's interesting... and creepy.

My only major gripe is one that I've seen others complaign about on the reviews aswell. Mainly that being that there are very few barriers as to how randomly generated the game is. On very rare occasions, I'd spawn, only to be immedeatly attacked by a zapper from behind. Sure, it doesn't mean much as most of your lives in the game are very short, but the argument stands as being that there must be no situation in any game where it is not the player's fault when he dies, irregardless of how meaningless the death is.

I've only scratched the surface as to what Receiver is. There's so much more to talk about. If you're somewhat interested in this game, and I've convinced you enough, grab it. If you're still somewhat skeptical, grab it when it's on sale.

It's the best cocaine trip I'll never have.

I remember watching the pros on the youtubes getting all the highscores, and particularly recall one being like "Yeah, it'll take about 20 hours to get good at this game"
I was like "Yeah, there's no way I'll ever be dedicated to a game that much..."

20 hours of gameplay later...

After playing the second installment in the Runner series and loving it to bits, I was enticed to buy the original, and am very sorry to say that this game does not hold up. I'll refrain from comparing this game to the sequel as much as possible during this review in order to keep things fair.

To start off. This game looks bad and sounds boring. I can't comprehend as to why the developer would want to keep commander video as a 2D pixelart sprite, and have the rest of the world in a disgusting looking, 3D, roblox-esque style. It would be much better if it were all just pixelart. To make matters worse, the music, which is supposed to be one of the game's main features, just doesn't mix well. The best description I can give it is that is sounds flat. The little chimes that play as you surpass every obstacle make it sound like a toddler bashing his xylophone at random, unfitting moments. There are upgrades you collect in each level which increase your mutliplier, and make the music climax, but that's the only redeeming factor about this bad soundtrack. Particularly, during the first boss battle, I was stuck listening to the same loop over and over and over again, for about 20 minutes. This made the battle downright boring.

Whilst I'm discussing the boss battle, I need to bring up something that's downright shamefull about this game: The fact that it breaks the golden rule of good video game etiquette. That rule being "When a player reaches a lose state, it should be his fault and not the game's". During the entire game, you spend your time looking to the right of the screen, watching out for obstacles. The fact that these obstacles move from the right side to the left means you have enough time to react and avoid those obstacles. This boss battle broke that mechanic, and sent obstacles towards me from just a couple of pixels infront of my character. The game stopped being something that could be compared to "The Impossible Game" and more like "I Wanna Be The Guy", where winning was no longer about how skilled you are, but about how you can remember exactly when you need to perform a precise action.

I suggest you purchase the sequel, and forget this game even exists.

Free To Play is a documentary by Valve, so although it appears to be highly influenced by them, it isn't exactly an indie movie. Which is fine, Valve have been known to give off some of the best video games in the industry, and the movie direction here is no different. I just wish the picture quality would be more consistent, seeing as some scenes feel as if they were shot with 4K cameras, whilst others could have been captured by a fairly cheap smartphone. Thankfully, the CGI shots Valve gave off for the little Dota 2 bits were gorgeous to look at.

The film itself focuses on the life and times of multiple video game enthusiasts, trying to live the worldwide dream: Get payed to play video games. As inspiring as the premise sounds, the actual way the story presents itself is quite pitiful. It's just depressing how it really made me pity them when they threw their lives away, hoping video games would put them out of financial trouble. It's only worse when the movie itself says that there's no guarantee of even getting paid if you go terribly enough.

It's blatantly obvious how this movie draws inspiration from Indie Game: The Movie, yet it's such a shame how the movie failed to have me feel even slightly the same way as when I watched the latter. You might feel differently if you share as raw of a passion as the characters in Free To Play. It just didn't click for me.

The movie itself deserves your hour and a half, only because it's free. I don't see myself re-watching the movie in the near or far future, unlike with Indie Game: The Movie, a film I've seen literally countless times.