Recent reviews by QuackedUp

fish

It looks pretty and has some good music.
But the level design is just way too bad, a lot of the time you don't even know what the win condition is, you just go forwards and complete the level. It's just too simplistic.
The movement is very clunky and janky, sometimes you have to move in a straight line for some time, but you can't just hold W, you have to juggle W and A, or else you'll fall off.
And the camera is soooo bad, it actually gave me motion sickness.

This game has a lot of potential but is just too frustrating at times.
My biggest gripe is that enemies are just so tanky that it's just sad. In a quest you have to defeat a golem, and after like 10 minutes of an Ogre and whittling down its health to 1/10, it gets enraged and jumps at you and with with a janky ass animation grabs you and removes half of your health bar, most of the time killing you, because it's really hard not to get hit because of the janky animations.
Another complaint is that there are not a lot of enemies, in the first 5 hours of playing I must've defeated like 7 cyclopses, and at first it was cool climbing it and poking its eye out, but got boring real quick.
The story is also not really that great.
But at times it can be really fun too. Customizing is really fun, it has a lot of cool armors and weapons. Combat(despite the janky enemies) is fun, with it's mechanics like climbing(it feels really cool climbing a cyclops and poking it's eye out). And it's also really good when your companions actually help you instead of standing still and not doing a thing like in other games.

nuh uh

The game looks really good, but it has nothing going for it in gamplay.
The shooting itself is alright, altough aiming is clunky. A main mechanic is covering behind graves(?) or other objects, but you have to hug them really close, and the animation between standing and covering is very little, so you'll of course get damaged. Literally everything is clunky and feels slow, you have to wait like a second between rolls, not giving enough time to get to safety. When going into cover you again have to wait a second before you can roll or do anything.

Upgrades, weapons, perks are usually what makes rougelites(k) but this game lacks everything. Like 4 gun types, sometimes with debuff modifiers like making the enemies bleed. Upgrades and perks/abilities have nothing really. Everything is basic and boring.

Holy ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥ how could a game this bad be ever made. I feel like the devs wanted this game to be a cross between Fallout and Doom, but just failed miserably.

Firstly the story, it was really bad and boring. It uses the basic theres a big bad, find some people to defeat it with, which is fine. And the fine things end there. The story just doesn't take itself seriously, its like a parody of itself. For example at the start of the game, your mother just gets killed and you are just like: Eh, who cares, lets go kill some monsters. Every interactions with other characters just feel out of place, and with ten layers of irony on top.

The shooting itself was pretty good, it felt like Doom shooting. But the enemies. Oh the enemies. A lot of enemies just take so much ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ammo to kill, they are just so spongy. Like for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ real, why do I need to shoot you in the head THREE TIMES just for you to die??? The game isn't hard, just frustrating. The main way the devs tried to make the game harder is just spamming so much enemies that you run out of ammo. The other is making an enemy so spongy you run out of ammo. And when you come across a difficult encounter all you can realistically do is sit behind cover, and shoot like 2 bullets every 20 seconds until the enemies die.
There are some good moments with the abilities, they can be really cool. But them being on a long cooldown, and not having any chance to go close to enemies because you'll die really quickly if they start throwing grenades, it just makes abilities not usable. There are like 5 bosses in the entire game, but youll have like 20 encounters with them, and it just makes them boring too.

The world doesn't feel empty, just annoying. There are things to do, the 3 same things all over the map. So it too just gets boring and repetative. You can also find data pads with some lore on them, but with the story being so bad it's not even worth reading.

A nice, short narrative game. You go from room to room watching recordings of the space station's crew's, while you also download the AI of the station, as that was the job you were hired to do. The recordings were nice, but there weren't really anything else to do, just walk, listen, walk, listen. Which is fine, but for me the story wasn't all that interesting, until the end. The end was really good, with a good twist. And with how short the game was, the previous boring story didn't seem that long in contrast. So it was fine.

Phew, this game was a ride. You are just trying to find a new place to settle down, quite some time after the nukes have been dropped, but always find the worst places.

The gunplay was really good, shooting, aiming and the such felt really good. You also have the option to customize your guns with attachments you find. And at first I loved it, then I realized the attachments don't do too much. Like I can feel the difference in power or accuracy, but there aren't enough of them where you could truly customize a gun.

The survival elements like fixing your gas mask and crafting filters didn't really add any depth to the game imo, but they also weren't annoying. So they are just kinda there.

The levels tho. So there are multiple levels, where you can explore mostly anything, mostly freely. So there are multiple open worlds. Which are great, I loved exploring stuff and unlocking new attachments and looting ♥♥♥♥. But A lot of times you just don't know what to do to actually progress. You do have a map, with a marker, but I found some examples where it just points to the wrong thing. And some passageways or interactables blend in so much that I was just running around a room not realizing I had to flip a lever.
The overall pacing was also kinda jank, can't really pinpoint my problem with it tho.

The story was pretty good too, I liked it a lot. Altough with the ending, I didn't even know that there were "moral points", so I just got the bad ending :(

You awaken as a robot in a garden of puzzles, as a God tries to lead you to eternal life, while you think about some philospohical ♥♥♥♥.
This is probably one of my favourite games with a puzzle tag but as a puzzle game it leaves some to be desired.

So like 2/3s of the puzzles are great, some even phenomenal. But the other 1/3, just, jesus. They struggle a lot with a good balance of noise(noise as in the puzzle, not audio). Sometimes there's so little noise I accidentally solve it, other times I'm having a meltdown just trying to work out what is going on. Some puzzles are just not sightreadable at all, you have no idea what you are supposed to do just placing ♥♥♥♥ and hoping it works. Some puzzles were more like Where's Waldo Puzzles, where instead of trying to figure out what to do with your items, you have to look into every nook and cranny just to find a connector behind some random ass wall(and thus waste a bunch of time, trying to solve the puzzle without one of the components), and just generally ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with the environment just to line something up.
But keep in mind this is only like 1/3s of the puzzles, the others are great.

But the story, oh man. I rarely get invested in a story so much as to actually read every piece of text I come across, and collect everything. The story focuses a lot on identity, understanding of the world, free will, all of the good philosophy ♥♥♥♥ while you solve puzzles and learn the story of a scientist doing sciency stuff and changing the world.
The music and voice acting complemented everything perfectly imo.

This is a pretty big upgrade from Asylum, a lot of the issues were fixed and is overall feels less bloated.
The story was pretty meh, but I never really liked superhero stuff so this wasn't really surprising for me.
The combat has evolved a lot since Asylum, but there's still a lot of problems. When there are 10+ enemies it just becomes annoying to deal with anything, and even with less enemies the combat can become really annoying.
The stealth sections were just infuriating for me. These 2 might be chalked up to me having a major case of skill issue but still, the combat is still more or less clunky and annoying.
The charm and feel of the game didn't really get me, as I said I'm not a big fan superhero stuff so it most of the time fell flat for me, but sometimes it was actually really cool tho.
So it barely gets a pass from me.