Recent reviews by Andras

Got this game from a Humble Bundle, and just giving a perspective of someone who knows next to nothing about WWE and hasn't played any previous entries in the series. If that's similar to you, this isn't the entry to hop on at, it makes a lot of assumptions that you already know what all the different modes mean, who everyone is, and what the special moves are. Pretty immediately set it back down since it didn't seem like the game was interested in bringing me up to speed.

Early access review: the bones of this game are very fun; enemies react well when getting shot, the guns feel varied, and it's very satisfying to grab an enemies rifle, point it away from you, and then grab a pistol off you waist and shoot them in the chest.

The game is at its best when it's frantic, like hotline Miami, where you hardly ever reload and instead continually grab guns off the fallen. But it needs some ironing out to fully enable that. Particularly, I think some kind of system to assume I'm doing something intelligent to feel better.

For instance, if I just dropped my magazine in a gun, I'm almost certainly going to be grabbing ammo of my belt, so for a couple seconds the hitbox for the ammo should be massive and take priority. Similarly, if there's a bunch of guns on the ground (which is common) give priority when I'm grabbing to ones that have ammo in them. And if I just dropped a gun, deprioritize that one so I don't get stuck in a loop of trying to pick up a particular gun and repeatedly grabbing a different one instead.

Again, there's a fun core to this game, and I'm excited to see what the narrative mode is. It just needs some edges smoothed out before it hits full release.

This is a great game with engaging combat and does a fantastic job of making exploration fun, which is something I normally don't enjoy in games. The dialogue is okay, the voice acting can vary in quality and the lip-syncing can be pretty bad, but wandering the Living Lands, wondering if there might be something interesting in the crack in the wall and being rewarded with treasure and environmental storytelling is a fun time. This is exactly the direction I had hoped the Elder Scrolls series would have gone instead.

I give a very lukewarm recommendation. There's a lot the game does well to address some of my normal gripes with JRPGs. The ability to swap out party members during combat is great. I like the use of crystals for weapon and armor upgrades to build combos. The overdrive meter keeps combat varied instead always using the same abilities.

But, man, does this game make you feel bad about getting stronger, and it really doesn't need to. Each piece of gear can be upgraded twice, and, without grinding, you don't get enough resources to upgrade all your gear all the way. What sucks is new gear is always objectively better, and you can never tell when you're going to find it. So instead of feeling like "sweet, a new sword" most of the time I felt "♥♥♥♥, I JUST upgraded my old one, and now I can't afford to upgrade this new one. On top of that, your gear has crystal slots, and when you upgrade it gains more. So this means if before you had 4 slots filled, but you can't upgrade the new one so it has 2. So now you have to figure out which ones to keep. And, for some reason, swapping crystals is an extremely cumbersome process (you have to go to a specific "remove crystals" menu, back out, and then go to an "add crystals menu"), when all other equipment is extremely easy to change (you can equip gear that someone else is using in the same menu, and it'll auto unequip from that person).

Similarly, leveling up is done by selecting new abilities and passives, and once you selected enough you can choose them from the next tier up. But your ability and passive slots are limited, so sometimes you have to pick something you know you aren't going to use. Or you unlock a new one that makes you replace an old one, which maybe you invested XP in (since you can put XP towards specific abilities).

I played enough to get my money's worth, but it was actually getting better equipment after having just spent all my money upgrading the old that made me give up. All the game needs is some kind of salvage mechanic so you don't feel like upgrading is such a waste.

I went into this game with pretty high expectations, as I loved Gunpoint and Heat Signature. But man, did it exceed them. I was expecting a pretty crunchy turn-based tactics game with a fun mil-sim-meets-magic skin to it. Instead, I got an extremely funny, well-told story and fleshed out world, while still making novel gameplay additions that I think address some of the worst trappings of the Tactics genre. It lets you easily explore and try out different possibilities, and gives you tons of tools to address a variety of situations.

If you like tactics games, particularly Into the Breach, you will love this game. And if you don't like tactics games because of the planning or number-crunching, I still think you might love this game.

I'm a little torn on how to give this review, but opted for positive since I have played it a good amount and on the whole enjoyed my time. It's a decent game, but what I find so frustrating is that I think it's one patch away from being a fantastic one.

The core of the game is great. The motorcycle movement feels great, shooting enemies midair while blocking bullets is satisfying, and combining the fun movement with a metroidvania is a really good idea.

However, I think the game took too much inspiration from Hollow Knight. It has a souls-like mechanic of dropping money on death that you can recover. Normally, this mechanic serves to add tension and engagement when going back over content you've done before and makes even simple enemies high risk as you wage the battle of attrition to get back where you were before. Laika has none of this, though. All hits are insta-kills so there's no attrition, and checkpoints are placed generously enough that you're almost always right next to where your drop is. And it feels to me as though the developers realized it didn't really fit and took the teeth out of it: you only lose half, you can drop multiple "bags" to recover, you can shoot them to recover instead of touching them, if you die by falling, there's no penalty, etc. I don't know what the mechanic adds other than annoyance if you happen to fall to an earlier part of the level and then die.

Reloading the gun by doing a backflip is a neat idea, but having that be the ONLY way to reload has messed with the pacing for me. An early part has you need to shoot 4 enemies together, but your gun only has 2 bullets before a reload. I tried a few times doing what I thought was the "right" way and kept getting shot, before giving up and shooting 2 from off screen, backtracking to a hill I could reload at, and then returning and killing the last 2.

Overall, I wish they took more inspiration from Super Meat Boy or early Sonic, since when you're flying by quickly, shooting enemies midair with the bullet time, the game really sings. But instead it feels like they were trying to make a precise, methodical game, which is just hard to do with a motorcycle.

This is a great game. To be honest, from the title and the cover art, I almost bounced off this game, but I'm glad I stuck around.

To me, the core but that separates this from other turn-based tactics games is that it adds just the right amount of crunchiness and customization. That each "unit" on the battlefield is actually a set of units that you choose adds a ton. In some ways it almost feels like a deck builder, constructing the right combination of units to fill the specific niches on the battlefield. And there's even more depth for those who want it, with individual unit affinities, traits, and stat bonuses, but I never felt that I HAD to interact with those systems if I didn't want to.

There are some issues; I wish there was a way to filter across all units, including those in squads, I'm not crazy about the artwork even though I'm generally a pixel art fan, the last few missions have too many units involved and can be a bit of a slog, but none of those seriously detract from the game.

I've probably beaten Halflife-2 close to a dozen times, it's one of my go-to nostalgia games. I figured this would feel pretty much the same, just with a headset, but it makes the game completely fresh again. Honestly, this is probably my favorite VR game, which really just speaks to the fact that good VR doesn't need to be built from the ground up; you just need a solid base game.

I really didn't want to give this a recommend. But I did play for 40 hours and 95% of the game was good. Just skip the last chapter, it is atrociously bad. Close the game after the battle on the rooftop, you can always go back and beat it if it turns out the next game rights the ship.

I loved the first one, and I want to like this game, but the controls just drive me nuts. Maybe I was just more forgiving when playing Boneworks, but there's just some really simple bad design decisions they made that makes it incredibly frustrating to play.

Yes, this is supposed to be more on the sandbox side of things, but it is FAR too easy to accidentally pull out the magazine from a pistol when you're trying to grip it with a second hand. Considering there's a button to drop the magazine, there are zero circumstances when I want that to happen, let alone that it's far easier to grab and drop the mag than to hold it steady. Maybe I've just gotten spoiled from The Radius's control scheme, but so far every single time I've died in this game has been because I've accidentally pulled out the magazine mid-fight or dropped the entire gun when trying to put it back in my inventory. Rifle are also a pain to use since the butt stock won't clip into your character model, so it will jitter around wildly when you shoot.

I just don't understand how this didn't come up in playtesting.