Recent reviews by The Gromble

What would happen if you took the design philosophy of Space Station 13, packed it in a survival-crafting-looting framework like 7 Days To Die, took level design pointers from PREY, and shamelessly copied ideas from Half-Life and the SCP Foundation? Under any other developer you'd have an absolute mess, but Deep Field Games pulled this developmental gymnastics routine off with grace.
The gameplay loop has a strong feeling of your usual survival-crafting slop: journey out from your base, harvest resources, come back to base, craft better gear and furniture. Where Abiotic Factor innovates is in abandoning the procedurally-generated open world most games in this genre adopt: every playthrough will take place in the exact same place, with the exact same layout, resources, furniture, and progression. Using a static gameworld allows Abiotic Factor to focus on having exquisite level design. The various sectors of the game are laid out intuitively, with (literal) signposting everywhere and a refreshingly vertical layout that allows players to scuttle around in the facility's rafters and cramped vents easily. Shortcuts, alternate routes, and unlockable trams make navigating to any particular point in the world easy to optimize, and a number of craftable transportation options (such as jump pads, ramps, pilotable vehicles, jetpacks, and personal teleporters) allow creative players to streamline their travel even more effectively.

A throwback to the old third-person shooter/platformers of the PS2 era, Onirism works as a successor to old greats like Ratchet & Clank or Metal Arms: Glitch In The System without blatantly copying them in spirit.

The gameplay is exactly what you'd expect from the genre: run, jump, use a variety of weird and thematic guns to kill a lot of very simple but varied enemies. The devs added some extra mechanics to make things more interesting, like reusable subweapons, a more in-depth parkour system for zipping around the battlefield, and a melee system that lets you combo enemies and dodge attacks. The end result is a frankenstein's monster combination of the mechanics of Ratchet & Clank, DOOM Eternal, and A Hat In Time. This makes the game feel very earnest but also very confused. The devs have repeatedly overhauled existing levels and gameplay systems, nearly always for the better. This game is definitely a shaky Work In Progress, but the foundation that's already there is solid and the presentation is endearing enough to ignore the jank and amateurish story.

Pros

• Fun movement system and aggressive enemies to encourage you to use it
  
• Weapons look, sound, and feel effective
  
• Lots of variety in levels and monsters
  
• Many, many costumes to put your character in
  
• Many extra gamemodes, including platformer bonus levels, a Nazi Zombies-like survival horde mode, a timed score attack wave-based arena mode, and a to-be-overhauled multiplayer versus mode
  
• Difficulty nicely swings between offering a decent challenge and being easy but engaging

Cons

• Most weapons feel samey, usually only differing in firerate and damage aside from their cosmetic features
  
• Level design doesn't take advantage of the movement or combat system as much as it could
  
• Story content is poorly-paced and cliche
  
• Cutscenes are blatantly unfinished at this point, most don't have voice acting, though this is subject to change

Hyperbolica is not long, or challenging, or particularly thought-provoking. That's fine, not every game needs to be any of those. What Hyperbolica is however, is pure technology in video game form.

From a distance, Hyperbolica is a walking simulator with a series of gimmicky locations: jungle maze, vaporwave museum, giant restaurant, snow field, and so on. The major sticking point here is that every one of these locations' true gimmick is that it is comprised of an entirely different construct of non-Euclidean space!

The excuse plot is all a setup to place you in a fully-constructed environment that defies basic logic-- the in-game map needs multiple different display modes just to help you understand where your immediate location is. The experience of trying to orient yourself inside an inverted sphere in first-person is worth the price of admission alone.

A game from the same (general) team behind Nightmare House 2 and Underhell, In Sound Mind has a bit of a pedigree for first-person action horror. Some lessons have been learned regarding pacing and puzzle design, and it shows clearly with In Sound Mind's fairly intuitive puzzles and rock-solid mixture of scares and thrilling events.

The enemy design is fairly poor, only having three different common enemy variants by the end, none of whom require much strategy to beat. This couples with the fairly limited but effective variety in weapons. Your pistol and shotgun remain satisying to use and effective against all enemies, but the other weapons are either not effective for their relatively scarce ammo or only useful for puzzles.

After EA horrifically botched this game's first release by sandwiching it between Call of Duty and their own Battlefield title--and also forcing it onto their controversial platform Origin-- this makes for a very welcome revival to a cult classic title. The main single-player campaign is short but filled to the brim with fully-playable setpieces and fun level gimmicks. The multiplayer is debatably inferior to Titanfall 1, lacking much of its loadout customizability and encouraging a certain few hitscan weapons over the entire rest of the game's arsenal. However, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more fun multiplayer shooter, especially if you enjoy going fast and jumping high.

Sunless Skies is, in my opinion, Failbetter's best game yet. Compared to its prequel, Sunless Sea, Skies offers more content and deeper gameplay both in the real-time space exploration in the airy High Wilderness and the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-esque decision-based interactions in ports and during special events.

Sunless Skies is a game all about slow, methodic progress. The space-faring steam engines your captain pilots move at a leisurely pace across the cosmos, taking a significant chunk of an hour to make a circuit around each of the game's four regions. Players are expected to make numerous trips to each port, making progress with stories when they can and using the new Bargains and Prospects system to sell trade goods at a premium otherwise. Players who aren't interested in a lot of waiting and a lot of reading will be disappointed in what Skies has to offer, but players who can tolerate that sort of thing will find themselves sucked into the rich world Failbetter has prepared for them.

Definitely a great game to whittle away a couple of full days on, and the price is definitely right.

Postal 2 is a game where you can urinate on your father's grave, get knocked out and repeatedly molested by hillbillies, and the end result is that, two days later, your ability to urinate on people is upgraded tremendously by the fact that you are now infected with gonorrhea. Play Postal 2.

WASTED is a game that strives to be a roguelite based on Fallout, and it largely succeeds at it. The setting is interesting, the characters are colorfully fun in their own stupidity, and the gunplay has that clunky but satisfying Fallout 3 style. My biggest gripe with the game is the general lack of variety in areas: after the first three floors of each of the game's Coolers, everything falls into the same set of rooms. And since the only levels in the game are Coolers, they get old fast.

Other than that, the game is quite solid. I would definitely recommend buying it if you enjoy dungeon-crawling.

GMT was a shining gem of a server in the golden days of Garry's Mod, and Tower Unite is its continuation in every sense of the word. Tower Unite aims to replicate the old GMod Tower experience as closely as possible, using a different engine and, of course, as a standalone game.

To that end, Tower Unite is clearly still a work in progress. The optimization and netcode need some fine-tuning, and it doesn't have all of the amenities GMT had before its end, but that is explicitly only a temporary downside, as the developers are hard at work improving and updating their game.

In the end, if you're very interested in recalling the old GMT experience, Tower Unite will scratch nearly all your itches. Don't go in expecting a complete experience, but don't also go in expecting a dead game.

More infamous than DAIKATANA and No Man's Sky combined, Spore is a game that's as newsworthy as it is worth playing. For anyone who listened to the hype and hoped for it to be the SimEverything Maxis said it would be, Spore is an enormous disappointment, but it's still worth playing. If you haven't heard of Spore before this point, it's definitely worth a play.