Recent reviews by Vlad Tepes

GOTY, soundtrack of the year

let's go john helldiver

panicore was recommended to me by a friend.

upon spawning in to our first match (medium difficulty) we were immediately killed. well, okay.
upon giving the level a few more attempts, this game just overall felt really frustrating and not enjoyable.
I don't understand the point of having a sound mechanic if the difficulty scale factor is essentially black and white.

on easy, the monster will not pay attention to any sounds at all
on medium, the monster will react and hunt you down with the smallest of sounds. this leads to a meta of simply not talking in game and crawling around trying not to make sound

the mechanics are not immediately apparent as the game has no tutorial or even helpful tooltips that guide you. I guess the intention is to bumble around on easy mode?

maybe there's fun to be had here, but it did not resonate with my group of friends. hard to recommend this. I saw a bunch of reviews comparing this game to phasmophobia or lethal company. this game is nothing like either of those and I see it having little to no replay value.

I will admit dancing in the lobby was pretty silly and fun though. most enjoyable part of the game by far.

hard pass for me, but for the price, it might be a decent purchase for yourself/your friends.

In short, I've had a lot of fun in my limited experience in this game, playing both with friends and solo. As some others have mentioned however though, this game shows much more promise currently than an actual flushed out title. it is _very_ early access feeling.

This game draws heavily from the concept of Monster Hunter, having a world hub, quests players can accept and go on together, and different equipment loadouts you can setup and bring on missions.

Currently, the mission offering is fairly limited, and you'll be able to play through/gear up in about the amount of playtime I have now (5 hours or so)-- despite what other reviews say, I have seen other people online, however I feel this game would feel best if you had your own friend(s) to play with.

keeping in mind this is all being made by one singular dev, I think this is a great start to a title, and am excited to see what gets added over the next couple years.

I would not recommend this game if you're looking for something to grind dozens or hundreds of hours with friends, but it's a great way to kill an evening at the least, and with any hope, will get much better with time. I also always prefer to support smaller developers whenever possible.

looking forward to questing together more in the future!

Stranded deep is kind of a hard game to review. I will say overall, I enjoyed my experience. but that experience was laden with issues.

I primarily played this game multiplayer online with my friend, and problems started popping up even with our first game session. we discovered the aircraft carrier, and shortly after realized that it causes incredible desync between clients. my friend became invisible to me, or I became invisible to them, and items we would place down would disappear.

the initial multiplayer load time is absolutely insane. I can maybe understand a 'first time' world sync, but this happens _every_ time you load into the game *or die and respawn* and it is not a short thing. we're talking upwards of 2-4 minutes every time you want to load in or die. can be very frustrating for boss attempts.

the game contains a 'gyrocopter', which, for some reason, is simply just not included in multiplayer.

two other frustrating glitches are sometimes you lose the ability to left click and use weapons/items. or the ability to right click and drag. reloading the game fixes this, which isn't the worst thing...if it didn't take so long to reload a game with the world sync.

*this all being said*:

I did enjoy this game, for what it's worth. if you are the kind of player like I am to basically play every open world survival crafting game that doesn't look like complete turds, you will probably like this.

from my limited experience in singleplayer, it was a *much* smoother experience overall, and a lot of the issues I had with the game seemed to only exist in multiplayer. that being said, I likely wouldn't have played this game without multiplayer.

if you're going to play this singleplayer and you like the genre, I'd say this is a solid title to grab, especially if on sale. if you're looking for a new multiplayer game, just be warned there will be issues ahead.

oh, and also if you play the game multiplayer and beat it, the person joining will not get the end of game achievement. you will have to use steam achievement manager or the likes to grant this.

Hellblusser is a juicy game.

It's a roguelike first-person dungeon crawler with some semi-random seed generation within the 3 tilesets available. Typically, I am not a fan of roguelikes, and the roguelikes I do enjoy are usually very obscure, but I found myself strangely addicted to this game.

The atmosphere is really cool, the artstyle is interesting, the music/SFX are great, and it all comes together into a nice flowing dungeon crawler that just feels good to play through without having to think too hard.

The boss battles are more like puzzles, and once you have them figured out, they lose all challenge, but are still very interesting the first time around.

Endless mode has been enjoyable as well, however, at this current time of writing this review / current game version, I am not sure how far you can actually push with endless mode because the item purchase options are very limited, and once you acquire all blessings, that's it, you're at max strength. But enemies seem to be more numerous/have more health the more 'loops' you complete.

With a few small itemization updates/changes to endless mode I could easily see me sinking 50-100 hours minimum into this game, but will probably stop with where I'm at (for now)--

Kick ring + drainer + drain blade build is very OP, but also very fun.

for 5$ this title is definitely worth your time, if you're into this style/genre of game.

I'm finding the reviews I've read to be really polar opposites, people either hating this game or thinking it was amazing..I'd like to offer my own insights:

In short, it was enjoyable in its current state. I do not think it's as 'deep' and 'profound' and 'amazing' as some of these commenters are leading on, but I attribute that to the fact that there is an overall appreciation at the fact that more games are taking a stab at expressing feelings and thoughts regarding depression, anxiety, and mental illness.

given the fact that the game is a beta and upfront tells me 'its not meant to be played' (a comment on itself obviously), a lot of the things I'd be critical about are easily overlooked. my biggest criticism would be in the pacing of the narrative overall, the players 'purpose' isn't made entirely clear until a fair ways into the chapter, and I felt the few areas where I tried to take player agency and 'go off the path' were handled oddly.

a couple specific notes which could be 'spoilers':
near the end of the first chapter you're brought to an area where you have to run around and collect clocks. one part of this area has an obviously 'off the path' trail/accessible land where you can see text off in the distance which says something like "why are you back here" "there's literally no reason to be here"...and then you unlock an achievement, "no reason to be here". again this kind of goes in hand with what I felt about the confusing narrative. the game is trying to convey to me the energy is wasted but I am given an achievement as a reward? yes I know 'everything is meaningless' but again, it's hard to tell if the game is actually 'deep' or just trying too hard

I thought the part with the navigating the path in the dark when you can only see the light on the sides of the path was probably my favourite part of the game and a great metaphor for depression. I think there could be some tweaks to make it a little bit more intuitive, but overall it was a great parallel.

I really like games in the 'walking simulator / narrative' genre so I'm glad to see a game like this come out. For a free game it was enjoyable and I would probably recommend it if you're into this style of game, but don't expect an adventure on the grounds of say, the stanley parable or beginners guide, but it does feel like a derivative work of those titles that takes influence from them which I can appreciate

Landmine Larry is a game with some interesting charm.
You may look at the trailers and think you already know what to expect, but you'd be wrong. There are some good moments when conventional 'gamers intuition' will let you down.

The ultimate goal is to get to the end of each level, and don't die. How you do that is up to you. Don't be limited by simplicity, jumping is your friend ;)

There are some really funny & frustrating moments to be had with this game. If you like quirky platformers, this is a nice way to kill a few hours!

I recommend Dark Souls™: Prepare To Die™ Edition