Recent reviews by jackdanielxie

This game rules so hard. If you ever played Kirby: Air Ride's City Mode, the game reminds me a lot of that, but frankly may even be an improvement in a number of places, making it very impressive as a student project, such as the addition of a "battle royal" schema which ultimately solves Air Ride's City Mode's tendency toward anticlimactic endings. Also kinda reminded me of cult-classic weirdo-game The Zoo Race? And that's always a good thing to be reminded of.

Most importantly, of course: couch multiplayer.

My only "complaints" are just in that the game had even more potential in it -- I would have loved to have seen more animals, more upgrades, more events, maybe ever 8-player splitscreen for some extra pandemonium -- but it's a student project that's free-to-play. That said, keyboard support would have probably been nice (...for those who use those, I'm not one, but they exist), and I also think the game could have benefited from the traditional battle royale practice of giving you a free life if you die within however many minutes early on.

The game is absolutely gorgeous, but listen here friends: there are way too many action platformers out there for you to play, and many of them are quite beautiful as well, and so simply "being beautiful" is not enough to excuse the fact that Legends of Ethernal is simply not a very good game. And while it may be "beautiful" this is hampered by the fact that the game's "beauty" feels very repetitive.

The feel of the physics, along with the avatar's silhouette, reminded me a lot of Limbo in how it played; Limbo had that distinctive "springiness" to jumping and falling that sort of felt like you were propelling a heavy ragdoll, which can actually feel very satisfying and fluid. Unlike Limbo, however, which exists under a completely despairing and oppressive atmosphere, Ethernal is bright and whimsical and as a result winds up using this fluidity of play to create a very comforting, relaxing experience, to which this sort of game-feel is well suited. The problem, however, is with how the other elements of the game interfere with this fluidity.

Firstly is the combat. Combat in Ethernal is very stop-start. It feels "static" and makes the game's natural sense of motion come to a complete stop. A game that came to mind a lot was Muramasa: The Demon Blade (an often relatively-neglected Vanillaware game that may not be as "complex" as Odin Sphere but I think I'd still tie with it as my favourite of their games), initially just because the level design was very reminiscent of it, but then because the platforming elements of the game and the combat elements of the game both felt really fluid, even though Muramasa quite literally stops you in place whenever combat begins, it still feels as though combat and movement are extensions of each other, they both feel satisfyingly fluid. Ethernal does not accomplish this. It doesn't help matters that pitfalls kill you instantly, even prompting a whole death screen, which feels weird in a game where enemy monsters chip your health away gradually, and there were at least two occasions where the game didn't really adequately communicate me that there WAS a pitfall to be concerned about.

Another impediment is the game text. I generally hate when a game begins with a lore dump, I think that's just bad game design (even though some of my favourite games do this--Super Metroid, The Wind Waker, and Mega Man 2 all come to mind, although they each had the benefit of setting their respective lore dumps to some of the greatest video game music ever composed), and this game's lore dump is regrettably unskippable. The lore is... not particularly interesting, and frankly could have been conveyed better if presented visually through the game's beautiful environments. See, once again I find myself thinking about Limbo, where everything you need to know is inferred from what you see.

Dialogue is another stop-start annoyance, is extremely perfunctory, occurs too often, and often says more than needs to be said. It would be enough to have the kid come home and find his family home destroyed, we the players can figure out the rest. Barring that, you could have the kid say something very brief (I'd have maybe even just confined it to a dialogue box that opens while you continue moving around to avoid the stop-start problem), but instead there's several dialogue boxes to click through, and then a brief bit of freedom to move, and then more dialogue boxes. I know you might want to tell me that it might seem odd to have a character discover his ransacked home and say nothing, but I'd counter that by reminding you that in one of the most moving scenes in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker discovers his family home in flames along with the visible charred corpses of his aunt and uncle and he does nothing but look at it mournfully and then look away. It is over in a fraction of the time this game takes to mourn the loss of a family home we've never even seen before and the disappearance of parents we've never even met.

Skipping dialogue is inconsistent, because while sometimes you can simply press A to complete the dialogue string and then A again to quickly skip it, every other dialogue string is tied to an animation that must be played out before it can be skipped -- what's especially hard to understand though is why you can't press A during the animation to at least load the full dialogue string like you can when there isn't an animation (I hate when dialogue boxes have the words or letters appear gradually rather than all at once, it's really f*cking frustrating when it's advancing slower than your normal reading speed, this is a video game design cliche that really ought to die out).

I did not play much of Ethernal but I played enough to know this wasn't for me. I checked out a playthrough online and skipped ahead to confirm whether or not this was all the game really had to offer and... yes, that seemed to be the case. In a saturated game market, a game like Legends of Ethernal needs to do more to intrigue me out the gate because, brother, I have a steam backlog of unplayed games over one thousand titles long and I don't have the time for it.

Okay, here's the thing, semantically: did I enjoy playing this? Yes. But would I recommend it? Um... no. I enjoyed the game because I had nostalgia for the old days of mascot platformers, but make no mistake, most mascot platformers were terrible, and Spyro is no exception. The game design choices are... baffling, to say the least, and feel very strange during play. Why are enemies who are wearing metal armour invulnerable to fire when metals conduct heat extremely well and yet are vulnerable to being headbutt when armour is specifically for protecting against that kind of blunt trauma? Some enemies which look like they'd be tough go down with one hit and some enemies which look like they'd go down in one hit turn out to be rather tough. You can invert the flying but you can't invert the swimming. And so on. Very few things in the game feel intuitive, and the writing is complete and utter nonsense even by the standards of its own genre, replete with some of the dumbest and least funny slapstick skits I've ever seen -- made all the more uncanny now that the cutscenes are in shiny modern graphics.

If you didn't grow up with these games, I think there's very little chance you'll like them. You're better of playing the better examples of the genre like those made by Rare (Banjo Kazooie, for example) or refreshes of the genre like Yooka-Laylee.

If I may sum this game up with a microcosm of its problematic qualities: in the second level, the prison level, the prisoners (a terrible offensive joke about Guantanamo detainees I think???) are all men, but the WOMEN in the prison are all mental patients, playing into misogynistic tropes and double-standards such as the presumption that the worst thing a woman can be is "hysterical," obviously playing into the pathologization of "women-ness" i.e. "speaking your mind and--" Hahahaha, gotcha. If you're the sort of killjoy bore who might react like this to the harmless media you consume then you already know the Postal series isn't for you. That's completely fine, you're entitled to your own predilections, and there's a whole cottage industry of games made to pander to you specifically -- why not go play Undertale? This game, on the other hand, is made to pander to an entirely different kind of freak: the petty edgelord.

Listen: I'm not humourless and I'm not above being juvenile. I routinely sing the lyrics to "In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins to include the lines "I know where you've been / there's c*m on your chin / you sucked off a bunch of guys! [cue drums]." I even enjoyed the old Postal games back in the day -- the issue is that Brain Damage just isn't all that funny, unlike in the OG games where you get to kill Gary Coleman (as voiced by Gary Coleman). The game's satire feels cheap and lazy -- the first level is almost entirely plagiarised from Psychonauts which is unfortunate not merely because it's unoriginal but because it was a constant reminder of one of the funniest levels in one of the funniest games ever made, all while having to sit through bog standard "edgy" American social commentary. Ha ha. Yuppies. Fat people. Hicks. Gun culture. Yawn. What are the actual jokes here? It's not enough to just show me a fat guy, you have to make a joke about fat people that actually makes me laugh. Instead they just talk in fat-voice and throw food at you. It all just feels so easy. But then I got to the second level, which takes place in a prison, and I was fighting Silent-Hill-type abominations and just thinking... what the f*ck is THIS a satire of? What's the joke in this Cronenberg monster? Has this game forgotten it's supposed to be a comedy?

The game itself, mechanically, isn't particularly memorable. Postal but make it Quake I guess? We live in a time where there's an overwhelming glut of retro shooters, some of which are just phenomenal, to the point where I just don't know why you'd choose this one. Amid Evil, Killbug, f*cking Ultrakill -- why waste your time with this?

We have arrived. Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is clearly an AI-generated game. The text is clearly generated with AI, in fact I would guess more specifically that it was generated with ChatGPT. Much of the art is AI-generated, some it so obviously so it's nearly comical. How much else of this game was AI-generated? How deep is the rabbit hole? It's hard to say.

Grim portents for the future of games.

One of the greatest games I've ever played.

Incredibly imaginative application of the now largely played-out "battle royale" format. Extremely fun, frenetic, pick-up-and-play, with short games you could fit into a coffee break.

Excruciatingly awful game. Just on every level. Mechanically very simple, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the fact that the developer was working with such a simply conceit and managed to, in every conceivable way, mess it up, is almost breath-taking. The hit boxes, for instance, are almost entirely inscrutable and, to make matters worse, even one single hit will deprive you of every item you've picked up. In a game centered on picking things up for points. One single hit can essential render a game immediately unwinnable. I found the controls quite slippery also, which compounds the previous issues.

The lobby is itself a huge issue. It's remarkable that a LOBBY could be such a mechanical setback, something which is, in most games, almost unrecognizable as a feature of gameplay. The lobby in Tomb Robbing with Friends is also the tutorial. There's other games with this conceit -- Soviet Jump Game comes to mind -- but Tomb Robbing makes it a chore you have to participate in every time.

The game's humour is cringe as all hell. There's not much else to say. It's cringe. The paltry and uninteresting unlocks -- embarrassing monikers, blasé skins, irritating character voices -- are excruciating. "Pineapple pizza" and some sort of variant of "OMGLOL" were among the unlocks. Very "lol so randum XD" type stuff.

Avoid. Not even worth it if it's on sale.

I loved the Stronghold series as a kid, and the OG Crusader was a favourite of mine. Ultimately the charm of this game's predecessor wins out; beyond simple nostalgia, I think the old 2D graphics more vividly capture the animation, and possessed an almost storybook quality. I give this game a conditional negative review: it is by no means "bad" but you're far better off going back and playing the original.

Bonus points for using a terrible Papyrus font UI, however.

NOTE: There is, at this time, no online multiplayer, only local. Friends and I have resorted to TeamViewer to get around this, but its very janky.

Beyond that? I highly, highly recommend Hero's Hour, which is effectively a drastically-improved remake of Heroes III, itself a nearly perfect game. Combat is much more streamlined now, and the game provides many QOL improvements.

UPDATE: been using Parsec now instead of TeamViewer, much better experience.