Recent reviews by Jazz

Very stylish score attack shooter with amazing soundtrack.
Story is pretty simple but it's very well voice acted.
Main story campaign is quite short and can be finished in one sitting (~2 hours).

All my hours are on non-steam version.
It's a pretty addictive game as long as you like the concept, first time I played it, binged it for like a week 8 hours a day.
Primary complaint/warning would be that the game doesn't have much outside of its main focus. It's a game about manufacturing chains and your end goal is good manufacturing chain that lets you launch a rocket. Aliens are there only to give you reason for building defense structures/put some extra pressure on you.

This just feels mostly same as WD1 but I'm not really digging the plot.

Main and only difference so far I see is introduction of the jumper, drone and tazer weapons. Which is kinda nice that they try to embrace non-lethal playstyle, and you now actually can beat some encounters without even entering the premises your self. However melee takedowns seem lethal for some reason, guards open fire on sight, even use grenades with disregard to their own, etc. Jumper "puzzles" feel very unnecessary.

Main group is kinda uninteresting, 8 hours in and still I don't get the motivation to play. Plus the whole premise of young hip secret group of hackermen, which sells merch, uploads selfies and gathers likes to fight the Man just feels weird. I know Pearce wasn't the most well written character out there but at least I could get involved into his story to just see it through.

It's just more of Far Cry 3+ with marginal improvements. Same outpost system, same underwhelming perks, same selection of weapons. Wingsuit is absolute trash: both wingsuit and parachute can't be used right away once you're in air, so those dead time frames make them feel unresponsive and unreliable. There's a somewhat large assortment of weapons, explosives and vehicles but their variants are functionally identical within their bases classes. Weapon modding has no variety either, you get only silencer and extended mag and there is no reason why you wouldn't want both.

Didn't like the writing either. The way story butts into open world gameplay feel to forced: you get "captured" by scripted event around 10+ times, get lengthy monologue from some failed Vaas clone and escape. Rinse and repeat. Btw, antagonists all have backstories, but these are covered only briefly, and they never outweigh how the game paints them as psychopaths. This makes for a very unsympathetic cast, which would make for a fine revenge plot I guess, but the way antagonists are disposed of feels rather anticlimatic and unsatisfactory. Game also reuses its own ideas too much and foreshadows certain events so hard you can easily call them before they happen. On top of this thrown in humor isn't very funny and it soils the setup for dramatic moments: for example, game tries to make a big deal out of indoctrination but one side mission lands you a Blood Dragon 3 set, where you're tasked with killing indoctrinated civilians in a variety of ways.

Overall it's meh, it's not bad per se but if you've played any other Far Cry 3+ game you can easily skip this.

It has all the bad rogue-lite tropes and isn't a fun FPS to boot.

It does the usual slog with draining you for health & ammo resources, making mistakes very expensive. If you run out of ammo, you're essentially ♥♥♥♥♥♥, and you're limited to 1-2 weapon slots at the beginning. In addition the enemy and room design is so random so it's sometimes impossible to avoid damage, e.g. enemies are sometimes placed behind closed doors and corners, or turrets are placed at the end of a long, very narrow corridor, robbing you of any means to dodge.

While trying to pass off as an old-school fast-paced game, it actively punishes you for trying to move fast through the level, mostly by sprinkling melee enemies that are hard to outrun and can swarm you if you rush into a room instead of patiently drawing them out. Weapon and enemy pool is very shallow, I've seen maybe 7-8 enemies so far and they can be split in melee enemies and ranged enemies, having no differences in effective behaviour (e.g flying shooting drone, walking shooting drone, big walking shooting drone, stationary shooting drone, large stationary shooting drone). Weapons I've seen so far are functionally identical and differ only by damage/spread/firing mode; except for the rocket launcher that doesn't even have a noticeable splash damage.

Overall it's just dull and doesn't deliver on the promises of being a retro-shooter because it completely misses what was good about, let's say Doom.

It's a fun concept but the game just doesn't do anything good with it. Levels aren't well designed and the game lacks any mechanical depth, which makes all levels, enemies and weapons feel similar even though the game clearly parodies other vastly different games.
It's also pretty dang short (around 3-4 hours). I guess you could play it for the references and humor but I didn't find those entertaining either.

Overall it's a nice game but it relies on RNG too much to be fun for me. You have some wriggle room in making descisions, but so many matter of life-or-death things are out of your control:

• Whole match 3 secion can leave you starved for ammor or energy so you won't be able to fire or defend yourself this turn, or with some good luck let you shoot twice as much (mind you, most encounters often last around 3-4 turns), same goes for your enemy.
  
• When entering a mission you have only general idea what kind of enemy you will encounter. It's not too hard to stumble upon a "medium" difficulty mission that ends up tougher than a "hard" mission because of the randomness of enemy gear.
  
• Gear you get access to is in general random. Sometimes you'll get a mission that gives you free gear, sometimes you'll go through a bunch of them without getting any viable defence upgrades.

Your repairs between missions and your upgrades are tied to same currency (scrap), so once you mess up big time past first boss, your run is ruined, your scrap spending snowballs and you're stuck with no upgrades until you get killed by progressively tougher enemies.

Game balances all this out just by giving you health upgrades each other time you get a "global" level up, essentially each time you die. Which essentially makes the game easier just by grinding XP. All other unlocks (4 mechs, 4 characters) you get in a first few hours of the game.

NEET cat walking simulator. Great soundtrack.

This game looks and sounds nice, but it just seems incredibly dull in the long run, mostly because everywhere outside of the Arcade mode, you're stuck with a basic gun. Any changes to your arsenal come as random temporary power-ups. Your starter pea-shooter shoots directly in front of you and only covers about 1/4th of the screen if you're moving, and struggles to take down even basic enemies introduced in first levels in a few hits. Later on when the game introduces larger, spongier enemies, main challenge comes from your inability to clear the path towards kitty abductors.

Very interesting mix of an FPS, platformer and puzzle gernes, with great melancholic soundtrack, that surprisingly has nothing to do with neither Quake nor Half-life (apart from sharing an engine and some assets). This is a Steam re-release of all three mods in the series (Half-Quake, Half-Quake Amen and Half-Quake Sunrise), compiled into a single game.

First game in trilogy mostly focuses on combat challenges with strict ammo economy, deeper into trilogy Amen has an even split of combat and mini-puzzles where you have to figure out what kills you in this room and how to avoid it. Final game, Sunrise, completely relinquishes combat, and moves towards more interesting puzzles. Each game is peppered with platforming, and I know some people don't like first person platforming, but it's never really too hard to become frustrating. You'll still die a lot, so bind those quicksave/quickload buttons to something handy.

Rooms are very diverse across all three games, with Sunrise specifically shining here. Challenges vary from a floor covered with turrets that go off when you step off them, walls slowly converging on you when you're not looking, train station that tests nothing but your patience, to simon-says, chess-board, text adventure and tower defence mini-games.

Visually first game lifts a lot of assets from Quake and Half-Life, while Amen and Sunrise have their own style, with amen being in bright monochrome with a hint of green, and Sunrise using more cold gray and blue colors.

There's a handful of sensory abuse (spinning rooms, pitch black and blinding-white areas, explosions and clangs), some cheesy dialogue and a few cheap shots, so this might not be for everyone. Personally I've enjoyed all three games, with Sunrise being my favorite.