Recent reviews by Game Dad

I really enjoyed Tyranny, but I didn't enjoy this DLC. I was more frustrated than not. The game doesn't very well communicate that choices you make very early on matter, and define how the DLC story plays out. These choices literally are a matter of who you choose to speak to, when you are starting the DLC. It locks you into a path, and you won't know until you're some time in to the DLC that you are now on a story path you may not have wanted to be on.

Add on some bugs with teleporters not working and character dialogues funneling you down specific paths to specific outcomes unless you complete this 'one weird trick', and I found myself giving up and just accepting a bad ending to the DLC after searching the internet for assistance to try and fix my story issues. It's a disappointing missed opportunity.

Tyranny is an excellent game, with an incredible amount of story and too many things to do. It is flawed, most certainly. The latter acts of the game feel rushed, and it's clear that there was more the developers wanted to do with it. However, at its heart, it's a brilliantly told story from the perspective of Judge Dredd, working for a dictator.

I can absolutely recommend it. However, on your first play through, work for the bad guys. Experience that, before you play again to experience the side of the story where you can be a liberator.

I really enjoyed Emily Is Away Too. I played once and made some mistakes that led to a less than ideal ending, but was inspired to replay immediately to try and remedy my sub par ending. Unlike Emily Is Away, good endings to actually exist here. And your choices really feel like they matter - even little mundane ones. I absolutely recommend it.

The game is decent and has a lot of promise, but it just feels like it never really left early access. There's some glaring issues with the game and it's balance. It feels like they padded out the gameplay after people complained that it was too short and too easy to finish quickly. Now, unlike other games in the genera where you can typically always move upwards, I reached a point in the game where I was struggling to progress. Paying bills, paying the incredibly expensive wages for collaborators, and constantly having to replace my expensive PC that broke down every week meant that my income flatlined and I wasn't able to continue moving upwards or buy new consoles. The game moves slowly, and it's repetetive by the third hour.

Right now, I can't recommend the game. There's potential here, for sure. I played it for a lengthy amount of time. But it just eventually became so frustratingly repetetive with so very little sense of progress that I gave up.

Defect is one of those games that is incredibly frustrating because there's so much here to love, but it's held back by interface design decisions and a massive difficulty curve that leave me simply unable to really recommend it right now.

This isn't because the game is bad, persay - but because after 3 hours of cushy gameplay and having fun with the ship building mechanic, I hit a difficulty spike. 3 hours more, and I've been unable to beat any one of the missions available to make any more progress in the game.

You are going to die a lot in Defect - which is fine. But what isn't fine is how frustrating it is when you die. Not because of how the game chooses to deal with death, but because of how the interface and design decisions of the game make you deal with death.

Build your ship, choose a mission on the map screen, watch the unskippable opening dialogue, play, die, get spat back out to the map screen, watch the unskippable opening dialogue, play, die, etc. If the game didn't waste so much of your time when you died, and allowed you to get straight back into another attempt to finish the level, it may not be so bad.

Later levels feel a little less polished and design-tested than the earlier ones. Early levels feel fairly finely crafted and well-considered, but after a few hours missions rapidly deteriorate into massive waves of enemy ships or torpedos that can instantly destroy you and send you through the cycle of restarting the level all over again.

There's so much here to love. The ship building mechanic is a whole lot of fun, and it makes me wish that they'd gone with a survival mechanic instead of the mission mechanic - survive, destroy enemy ships, gather salvage, upgrade your ship. Instead, the missions get repetetive - complete the objective, destroy your old ship, have your new ship stolen, repeat in the next mission.

The combat is okay, and it feels like tweaking the parts on your ship is hugely important. There is strategy in being a small, fast-moving ship - or a large, hulking one covered in armaments. But the game doesn't seem to fully consider this fact. It may encourage you to build a small, fast-moving ship - only to end a mission by spawning a mass of enemy ships right on top of you.

These are all problems that can be fixed, and I'm willing to give the developers the benefit of the doubt that they will do so. But until then, the game is simply too frustrating to recommend.

Wait for a few months for the issues to be fixed and check back.

Punch Club is a fun game, but it's incredibly grindy. You very quickly run into a wall where your progression is limited by skills (the cost of which increase by 1 every time you level up), and you are pit up against enemies that have unlocked abilities deep in skill trees that you have not even unlocked yet.

The ongoing grinding to keep your skills at peak performance feels true to life, but combined with the tedium of having to unlock abilities, the game goes from running at a sprint to tiptoeing in around 1 hour of game time - everything after which is grinding and going for just 'one more ability'.

I don't think most people would have the patience.

Read nothing about it, just play it. Go in totally blind.

I'm not sure I've ever experienced a game quite like That Dragon, Cancer before. I've struggled to find ways to describe the experience, but I think it's something best experienced for yourself. Bring tissues.

Does not play well online. Repeated disconnects with multiple hosts attempting to host. Game difficulty varies and spikes like crazy, even with the mission supposedly on normal difficulty. It feels very much like you need to have all the best gear to really have good fun with the game. Probably was great when it was first released, but it feels really difficult to actually get into the game now. Fun concept, but the execution kinda falls flat.