Recent reviews by Dr. Büni

This game has given me so much joy, it's a rare occasion where I feel at peace by pre-purchasing an expansion (even after the disaster that was SotO). I'm very excited for the spears, and I'm also hoping we get land Harpoon Guns down the road.

I love Guild Wars 2. It's my favorite MMO. But I could never praise ArenaNet for Secrets of the Obscure. This newest expansion is nothing short of abhorrent. There is not enough content. The new maps are super boring. The demons feel uninspired. The story is SO bad. The performance in the Wizard Tower is really bad, too.

Unless you really, really want to play with the new weapons, I suggest not wasting your money. By the way, you have to play through most of the terrible story to unlock the new weapons, after buying the expansion (or play a lot of World vs World), so that sucks, too.

I was not a Guild Wars 2 player when Heart of Thorns was released, but it is easily my most played expansion, and unless expansion 5 is 300% better than Secrets of the Obscure, the time of quality expansion releases for Guild Wars 2 is long gone.

Stage 3 alone is worth this game's price tag. Everything else is the icing on the cake and I haven't even finished it yet. Might update the review once I do.

I am of the opinion that shmups and platformers (beat em ups as well, look at Scott Pilgrim) can always be elevated by a good, unique, enjoyable story line. ZeroRanger has this very esoteric, strange story line and I have no idea where it is going, but it is lovely, flashy and enjoyable. The story doesn't waste your time, yet it wraps the entire experience and makes it all the much better. It is basically salt, you know? Food often needs salt to bring out the flavour, and I think the story line fits that purpose here.

Remember that a good story is a good story, you don't need your game to have 10 thousand lines of events and dialogues for it to be good. Games of the aforementioned genres are better off with stories with fewer interruptions, with lots and lots of things told via level design, artwork and so on. On that end, ZeroRanger so far has been doing a terrific job for me.

Oh yeah, and the music is 10/10. So are the visuals!

Many games attempt to tell stories that rival those we can find in books, but what if someone made adorable and short poetry into a platformer? That is Moonleap. It is short, beautiful and sweet. It leaves you wanting for more, but satisfied you got play it and experience it in the first place.

The best 2D platformer since Shovel Knight.

I haven't given 10/10 so quickly to a game since Shovel Knight in 2014.

Monolith has such a fun gameplay loop. It is simple, fun and juicy. I haven't played that many shmups, but among the games I played in the genre, Monolith stands at the top.

The music is beautiful and fitting. The backgrounds went unnoticed by me at first, but once you see them, you cannot unseen them. The UI is perfection and I love how it changes color and even animates based on the player's health.

The bosses are SO MUCH FUN. Each boss has a very unique fight. The boss of the third level? That is the kind of boss design that makes me excited to design my own bosses in my game. Incredible stuff.

I will be trying to 100% the achievements of Monolith, that is just how good I think it is.

Blazing Beaks is quite the cute game, and juicy, too. The characters are really adorable, and I dig the concept of all of them being beaked animals. The few bosses the game has are also interesting, if sometimes frustrating.

That is where my praising ends. Blazing Beaks seems to be inspired primarily by Nuclear Throne, but it fails to reach the highs Nuclear Throne does, while not reaching its own unique highs either. Since it is inspired by such an oddball of a roguelite, that means Blazing Beaks doesn't do much to compare itself or even surpass the popular names in the genre.

The main hook - aka the selling point of Blazing Beaks - is the curse system. Instead of finding upgrades as you play, you find curses. Curses are nasty downgrades, of course. You have to endure them until you find a shop, where you can trade the curses for upgrades with the Crow NPC. But the problem is for such a system to work, the upgrades have to be VERY interesting or VERY powerful, and they are usually neither. More often than not the upgrade is some nonsense such as "Chance to have less enemies in locked levels", despite locked levels by themselves being a rarity. Or upgrades related to being able to buy more weapons in the shop, despite being able to only carry one weapon at a given time (and most of the weapons being extremely underwhelming).

Edit: I forgot to mention how rare the shops are, so more often than not you are stuck with nasty curses, unable to trade them to semi-useful upgrades.


Listen, I am not a game design specialist. In fact, I don't even have a commercial game released yet, but even I know you want to make your features exciting for the player, especially such a core feature. This game wasn't made by some solo dev struggling to juggle programming, writing, design and art - at least it wasn't, as far as I know, and even then, I have seen games made by solo devs being treated better. What excuse do the devs have? I understand not every game is going to be shipped as a masterpiece, but why not update the game based on common feedback given by the players? Nothing I said in this review is unique, it has all been said in previous reviews posted by other folks.

Which brings me to a point I mentioned above. BB seems to be inspired by Nuclear Throne, but it slow and boring, instead of having the frenetic gameplay from NT. There is nothing wrong with a more methodical approach to shooter gameplay, Enter the Gungeon is just like that, but Gungeon has hundreds of guns, upgrades and synergies to play with, while BB has nothing like that. Nuclear Throne remains fun to this day, despite being very low on content, because it gets real on the first few levels. There is no time for me to worry about play a run with a crossbow for the 100th time when I am excitedly fighting for my life. Besides, each NT mutant (playable character) has way more unique features than a beaked fellow in BB, which is a shame because I love how the BB beakies look like. This game oozes charm as far as looks as concerned, it is a shame the gameplay disappoints me (and there is no story either, so...)

So BB can't quite compete with NT, but that is fine, right? Sure it is. But it also lacks content and novelty, so BB can't find a spot among roguelites such as Binding of Isaac, Gungeon, Risk of Rain and Skul either. At the end of the day, Blazing Beaks stands in a limbo. A beautiful game with interesting visuals and a premise that could have been improved until it became something truly precious, left to die, to be forgotten. And that is the saddest part about it. It is easy to remember the great games, and the truly awful ones, but the so-so games like Blazing Beaks are the easiest to be forgotten.

Game is very fun and does a lot with little. The animations are very basic, but pleasing. Stuff seems to be animated via code, or maybe Juice FX instead of traditional, frame by frame animation, created in some animating software. Which is fine, it is what I am doing for my game, too. There is only so much you can do, and as long as it looks pleasing, who cares.

I don't know if it is because the animations are so simple, but the dev added tells to the bosses and dangerous enemies in the form of arrows pointing towards where the enemy will dash to or shoot towards. Which I think it is a fun solution and the game would be a lot less fun without the tells/warnings.

One thing I detest is the CRT filter. Not the filter by itself, but how cranked up it is when you first load the game. It hurts the eyes, in my opinion. Fortunately, you can toned it down in the video settings, and I think it looks great at around the 20% mark, maybe 40% at most. I am just brainstorming here, but maybe the reason for the heavy CRT filter is to mask how simple the graphic assets are? The designs aren't particularly original, but the assets look cute enough, so I don't see the problem with them.

Now, the game is full of references, even if the dev tries to deny it - Heck, there is a boss that has a word for word quote from Nasus from League of Legends (which in turn might be a reference to something else entirely, knowing Riot Games). There is a ghost enemy that looks identical to the Boos from Mario, too. Personally, I prefer references that aren't too on the nose like a word for word quote from another game or what have you, but references by itself aren't bad. In fact, I quite like them, it is fun to figure out what kind of games and medial in general inspired the creator of the game I am playing, and it is also a way to celebrate and homage the games that shaped us as gamers and developers.

Now, I am sure some of what people (myself included) are reading as references aren't actual references, but it is hard to deny the game is full of them. And what puzzles me is that, once again, there is nothing wrong with referencing other stuff in your own work. We don't live in a vacuum, after all.

Anyways, that is all from me for now. Fun game, and very cheap, too. I definitely recommend it.

I recommend using Godot instead, if you are a beginner. Don't pay for Game Maker Studio 2, download Godot Engine (which is free) and buy the GDQuest course, if you want to spend money. If not, it is totally doable to learn with YouTube tutorials. Hop into the Godot subreddit, people there will have tons of tutorials and YouTubers to recommend.

It is fun, but the focus on 2v2 is really bizarre to me. 1v1 is where it is at when it comes to fighting games.