Recent reviews by Red Knight

Playing this game yields two experiences.

Singleplayer - Exploring a beautiful expanse, enjoying the company of the local wildlife and bringing home dinner!

Multiplayer - Basically the same thing but with a buddy. You'll even get to hate crime a bear if you're lucky! Or wedge an ATV into another ATV, or your buddy, and fling yourself approximately 1 metric f*ck ton of kilometers away!

I first played this game a few years back on my Xbox One. I'd just moved into the basement, opened a pack of beef jerky, and proceeded to get incredibly bored sitting in a blind seeing nothing for an hour. It was effectively the experience I was expecting.

A year later, my buddy and I picked up the game again and had some new fun with it, even roped in another friend of ours to try it for a bit. Nothing ever felt like it stuck though, it was a good game, but not a game I could particularly enjoy, until now.

I saw the game on sale for a glorious $2, the Hunting Pro Bundle for $30. I was on a spending spree for my library, so I picked up a copy for me and my buddy. Being that, we are now older, smarter, and better at hunting, we loaded in, saw a bear charging at us, and mag dumped him until he slumped over. I don't think what we did to that bear was legal. But it died! And we got money!

We then proceeded to do the same thing to several turkeys. And a few more bears. And the occasional lion. Also a moose or two. We hate crime'd more than a few animals.

Greatest, most realistic hunting game I've ever played. Would hate crime a bear again.

Last night, I was playing games with like 8 other people in a voice call, and someone says "hey with this many people we need a party game", and someone suggested Lego Party as a joke. I had never heard of this phenomenon, EVER. But I knew I needed it in my life. After bartering with half of the call, we managed to scrounge 4 players including myself, and we played a game.

If the fact that I got a text from my mom telling me to shut the f*ck up because it was 1AM and I was laughing so hard, I don't know what to tell you.

This sh*t is Mario Party polished to a pristine quality. Play Lego Party.

I quite often peruse the Steam store for anything that could possibly catch my eye. Anything on sale, niche games that pique my interest, maybe an old game I haven't thought of in a while and want to reexperience, and today was the day that drew my interest to this game.

It's your typical zombie RTS, which I'm usually not a big fan of. RTS' in general don't really grab me well in terms of expectational joy, but IFZ does it differently. The concept of using real world locations as the basis for the map, and I do mean 1:1 locations from the real world like google maps turned into an RTS, really makes things interesting. I quite often think about what I'd do in an Apocalyptic scenario, where I'd go, who I'd bring with me, how I'd hold out over time. So to see that I was able to actually pick my home town as a location to survive really hooked me.

The game takes real world buildings and locations, and translates that into actual game mechanics that make sense. I live near a cattle auction yard, somewhere you would associate with farming. I look at that area in game, and, yeah, it holds crop seed and other agricultural resources, like you'd expect it would. Of course, it's not all 1:1, I'm not quite sure why the swimming pool near me was designated as a Police Station with firearms and riot gear, but I'm not complaining!

Being that I don't really get into survival RTS', I'm not sure as to what the norms are for how they work, but this game does it quite well! There's random events with searchable buildings, raid groups, survivors, and infected basically everywhere just roaming around. I had one moment where I sent a group out to a building and they got jumped by a small band of raiders and got held captive, leading to a full conversation between me and the leader of that group. I attempted to trust them and offered some food in exchange for my people back, to which as expected, they kept the food, my people, and the second group I sent to give them the food. So I ended up creating another group geared to the teeth to kick their ♥♥♥♥ in and get my people back. I even felt a little bad when that third group came back with only one of the four members surviving.

Anyways, as much praise as I give the game, I do have one gripe with it, one I hope could be fixed in later versions as with it still being an Early Access release.

When choosing your location, you're given about 2.25x2.25 kilometers worth of distance central to the "chunk" you selected. Each chunk is around 750x750m or so (keep in mind this is me estimating by comparing with google maps), and you're allowed 3x3 chunks for explorable area. Every chunk outside of that area is masked in white fog, but not inexplorable. If you zoom out far enough, the map transforms into what Google Maps looks like, roads with grey boxes for buildings. You can't explore any of the buildings like you would in your central area, instead teams sent out into those chunks will search the entirety of that chunk. I'd prefer it if they were actually searchable individually.

An idea I offer is to increase that chunk area to like a 7x7 instead of a 3x3. It would give some small towns more room to play with, or at the least make it so that new chunks are rendered when they're explored, that way you can still search things individually. I'd like it if I had more room to play with.

Apart from that, I love it! Great stuff.

I have a soft spot for games like this in my heart. It started when I was a kid playing Telltale's TWD way back on Xbox 360, evolved when I played Detroit Become Human, and now I'm here playing this. Both of those two prior games have forever solidified themselves in my soul as eternal masterpieces of media, so logic states that when this dropped, it'd be an instant buy.

However, when it comes to new games, I am very hesitant to make instant purchases. Due mostly to the state of the economy these days, but also from the fact that betting high expectations on new releases almost always leads to tragedy. When it came to Dispatch releasing, I saw Moist Critikal was in it, as well as Yung Gravy, and marked it on my list. If Charlie says something is good, I listen.

That comes to today, I finally decided to sell an old CS2 knife I'd been holding onto so I could buy the game since I figured it was fantastic enough to play, and holy f*ck, do I love being right.

The sound design is on point, the story is spectacular and gripping, the artstyle deserves a chef's kiss, a thousand times over. The voice acting is beyond incredible, every V/A does a terrific job to make their characters come to life, and while yes, the big players like JackSepticEye and Moist are hard to ignore when you hear their voices, but they still do an amazing job at sounding like their characters, not just themselves.

And to bring back that earlier point about the story being incredible, I am a story first, gameplay later kind of gamer. I adore my good stories. There's a reason that The Last of Us Part I, Red Dead Redemption 2, hell, f*ckin Deltarune, are some of my favorite games to date. Great games unto themselves, with beautiful intrinsically written stories to boot. When I say that this story is just as great, take it as gospel.

If you got the money, or even if you gotta sell something like I did to play this, give it a chance. I think you'll love it too.

I have been a die-hard fan of the first Dying Light since its release, and it has been one of my favorite story-based zombie games of all time, up there with the tippy top of that list, The Last of Us. I absolutely adore it. I bought the second game on release on my Xbox, and maybe got an hour of time into it before I was disinterested and moved on.

Now a couple years later, I've thought back to that older time and wondered why I never put more time into it. I bought it and the first game here on steam like a year ago, and since then, the second game has just been rotting in my library. I figured since I had some time on my hands, I'd put more time and energy into it.

Never before have I been so incredibly disappointed in a sequel to a game I've loved.

A lot of my gripes are very nitpicky, i.e. things you wouldn't really notice or think about if you weren't REALLY paying attention. But with me being older, I'm able to notice flaws a lot more than I used to, no matter how small, and my tolerance for such flaws has diminished alongside that. So, I'd like to put my thoughts down and really talk about why I dislike this game, because in all reality, I feel like I do in fact enjoy it, but it feels held back by a lot of qualities. Most of my gripes come from the fact that I adore the first game, so a lot of the things I don't like here stem from the fact that it's a downgrade of major capacity.

The first thing I noticed, worldbuilding design. In the first game, you are taught how to make a medkit while healing an injured person right in front of you. You subconsciously associate it with something that could heal, YOU. Instead here, you are taught how to make a medkit, for the sake of teaching you how to make a medkit. You don't even need to heal at that point, no dialogue excuse of "oh gosh i'm injured, i should make a medkit".

On top of that, there are things in the prologue home that irked me immediately. In the first game, no piece of dialogue exists without purpose. Everything that everyone says, is designed with a reward in mind, whether it be mission completion, story progression, etc etc. In the second game, Aiden looks at a painting and says, "this is what qualified as art? weirdos". This isn't Undertale, or some Telltale ass interaction game where every piece of furniture has a text box. This is Dying Light, and the Dying Light that I thought I knew doesn't just quip for the sake of a small laugh. I get the need to add dialogue to add personality to your characters, but there are better ways to do it. Take how The Last of Us did it, turn it into a dialogue interaction between to characters, or give an insight to your character's thinking.

On top of all of that, a lot of the dialogue in this game doesn't mesh well together. Person A starts and finishes their sentence, then Person B starts and finishes their sentence. It feels like the game is waiting for each person to say their piece. Now, think back to the end of Dying Light 1, when Crane and Rais are having their final exchange. The dialogue flows, it's bounces between both in rhythm, and Crane even cuts Rais off at one point, as well as the GRE later in that same cutscene. It feels real, like a genuine conversation. But to this game, it's like the game is checking to see if "diagolue_1" is finished so it can start "dialogue_2", instead of it all being a part of the same mp4 if that makes sense.

Speaking of dialogue, please explain to me why they had to find the one voice actor on the planet that sounded the closest to Roger Smith? If you're gonna reuse a voice actor for a different character, which even on its on is lazy on the front of it, REUSE THE VOICE ACTOR. It took more work to find Jonah Scott than it could've to just renew Roger's contract.

Next up, the motion capture and camera control in cutscenes, in tandem with cutscene pacing. Think back to the first game, back when you meet Rahim in the Tower. His mo-cap feels alive, more than just a character in a video game, and the camera in those cutscenes really do feel like I'm seeing it from Crane's perspective. Meanwhile here, the mo-cap moves for the sake of moving, just to fake showing that these characters are supposedly alive. It feels like an older RPG where NPC's cycle through idle animations, instead of them moving like real people. The camera is taken up by their entire silhouette and moving the camera does not feel nearly as smooth as it did prior.

Keep in mind, as negative as I'm being, all of these aspects fail as being a sequel to an already incredible experience. Most of the game is actually fun to play, the minute to minute I mean. I like how they changed the quests to include more nighttime segments, I like how parrying and blocking feels. I'm not completely dunking on this for being awful, because it's not all that.

Anyways, the crux of why I'm writing this at 4hrs playtime: I got into the metro tunnels, getting to the end of what I assumed to be the first act of the game. I walked up to a door, game crash. No biggie, game crashes occasionally happen even to the monsters of the industry. I boot it up, crashes on file load. I boot it up again, it crashes at a different door. I boot it up, AGAIN, and it crashes before I even start the dialogue prior to either door. I have one of the best PC's money can buy, graphics should not be the issue. But even if it was, that seems like such an obvious crash that testers should've noticed.

I do like this game, at the very least, I want to. But to love games to their fullest, I need to criticize them to see them in their best light, so they could be improved for the future, or at the very least not let those mistakes happen again. With most of the issues I described, this feels like a live-service mmo, and it should not feel this way. This should feel like Dying Light 2.

The game, is great. The story, feels.. underdeveloped. And due to the fact that I as a player am a story first, game second type of person, I can't recommend Dying Light 2.

My story with this game is about the same as everyone else, at least for the early days. Game released, blew up out of nowhere, and suddenly it was nominated for GOTY at the last second. I, as per usual when a game like this comes out, stayed in my own lane. Didn't buy it out the gate or researched it at all, just left it alone.

Then, my co-worker started playing it and was losing sleep over playing it. Even came in late one day for work because he stayed up too late and slept in. It was marked on my radar that day, but I still didn't dig into it. It was only after my best friend was playing it and let me "play" a game through his discord screenshare, where I made the choices with him giving pointers. That run failed by Ante 4, as most first games go, but it had the intended effect; I liked Balatro, and wanted to play it more.

So I finally bought the game, like a year after it came out. It was a slow start for me, having a hard time unlocking jokers and getting through the early game, but once I hit the ground running, velocity only ever went up from there.

Day and night, thinking about builds and how to shape my deck perfectly, everything focused on making numbers go up. It's addicting, and yet, so incredibly simple, AND YET, SO INCREDIBLY COMPLEX. This game is the perfect game to either lose hours to, or do something in the background while watching something or talking to people.

This game is awesome. Just buy it.

I've always, to this day, ALWAYS been a fan of story-games, especially ones with emotional impacts. I woke up to a Discord DM telling me to play this, and hey, I don't regret it. I wouldn't place this on like, top five story games of all time, but it's certainly up there if you want a good, emotional story.

Unreal. I'm gonna remember this for a long time.

Take every good platform fighter of the last decade, add some inspiration from Your Only Move Is Hustle, and you get this gem of a game. I can't think of a single platform fighter ever made that allows you to PARRY your enemy's attacks and have it be such an advantage.

I was lucky enough to have early access a week before release along with around 30 other creators give or take, and while I generally suck ass at platform fighters, I got to play against some truly talented individuals, and I was able to see firsthand the potential this game has for the future. With more characters to be released in coming weeks, and possible workshop support on the horizon, the possibilities will be endless.

I haven't heard any genuine complaints about this game from those who had early access, everyone has spoken incredibly highly of it. Even HungryBox - YES, HUNGRYBOX - said it was fun. Why not try it for yourself?

If you want any more info about it, go look on Youtube. There should be a decent amount of content about it that can tell you. (Y'know, like my video.)

I think this game is my ringer for "game that I'd never heard of but got the most fun out of". It consumes my every waking moment. Every evening, employees stock everything. Then, order new stock with the Ipad and employees put it away. Then purchase new products. Every Friday morning, mark up your prices. Some prices don't mark up. But if it can be marked up, always make store prices 1.85x market price. Employees work well. Except for Eugohn. Eugohn doesn't do Cashier very well. Unfortunately we're short staffed so Eugohn doesn't have a choice. Profits soar with each day that passes. I take out a loan every two weeks for a bump in profits and every bank in the city hates loves me. I have done everything to maximize profits. All of these thoughts aren't separate, they all speak in my mind at once. The Supermarket is everything to me.

Best part? Game doesn't cost you a penny. How often does a free steam game lead to this? I ended up buying the DLC just because of how much I enjoy it to support the devs.

Don't get me wrong, this game isn't for the weak willed. When I say that I have to mark up every price in the store every Friday, I mean it. That means running around EVERY SHELF with a calculator and price tags once a week to make sure profits continue soaring. It's always harder in the early days, but once you have enough employees to automate everything, you can sit back like every retail manager in existence and let others do the work for you.

I love this game. And if you're looking to do something in the background instead of playing something with friends, I'm sure you will too.

I loved Undertale as a kid. I was someone who adored the game and the fandom for a REALLY long time, and if you gave me a full week to info dump about the most niche AU's, general fan content, or things from the game itself, I don't think I'd get it all. I say this to preface that when I opened this up for the first time, I felt like that same kid playing Undertale for the first time, and how I fell in love with it so quickly.

Suffice to say, as of beating a casual 'pacifist' run of Deltarune up to Chapter 4, I'm convinced that I just played the best game of all time. Even after doing a full second playthrough, a 100% completion 'casual' run, it only strengthened my resolve to call it such.

Toby Fox said that his creation of Undertale was a test run to see how game creation would work, which was inspired by a dream he'd had of the perfect ending to a story. We are watching that perfect ending unfold one chapter at a time and I will be here every chapter going forward to witness it all.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, for my sake, for the countless other people who've played it, for those who make content of it, and for Toby Fox himself. Please, play Deltarune.