Recent reviews by Snowy

It's an open world, creature collector! I really enjoy the designs of many of the creatures in this game, exploring the islands with them, and doing all sorts of fun stuff with them!

It's also a multiplayer game with community-owned dedicated servers, which is a very nice change of pace from all of the live services nonsense that AAA developers like to spew out. All multiplayer PC games should strive to be like this.

This game was once pretty fun to play. The weapons were all fun to use, the movement was really well designed and felt great, and the characters were pretty nice. Yes, it has cosmetic lootboxes, but the developers had made a good enough game that it didn't really matter that much.

Unfortunately, I just don't think I can really recommend the game in its current state.

Come the latest update, the weapon sandbox was drastically altered, and not really for the better. A lot of weapons take just a tad too long to get enough damage off.

Additionally, the jetpack ability was nerfed heavily to the point where some characters don't have it, where others have only a horizontal boost.

Lastly, they changed a few characters (they started doing this recently, such as Ember being way different now). For Maggie, while her new appearance isn't bad by any means, I thought her original appearance was quite charming, and only a few skins feature it now (but for how long?).

Ignoring the cosmetic changes, this game is not so much a "fast-paced battle royale", but more of a slower-paced FPS. This, in itself, isn't terrible, as I am sure some people may appreciate a slower game, but the game I knew before is gone now, and I don't really like the game that replaced it.

As such, I am saddened to change my original and positive meme review to a negative review, as I simply cannot recommend this game anymore, given how much time I spent playing this game.


----- (ORIGINAL REVIEW from 2023-10-31) -----

My friend and I were playing, and we saw someone driving a vehicle towards us. They then used an emote that looks like an angry duck, and they instantly killed us about 5 seconds later.

10/10 would get ducked on again

This game is fantastic. But after many runs that were ended by game crashes, I really think it's hard to actually recommend this game. And it's a shame because, again, this is a really good game. One of my favorites, in fact!

I think this game's biggest selling point is that it has so much replay value to it. The game loop is really fun to get into, and there is a lot to do for 100% completion that will (probably) not leave you bored. After all, it mixes a lot of elements from Roguelike (e.g. randomness and permadeath) and Tower Defense (e.g. lots of mobs going towards a thing you need to protect with towers), and these genres are essentially designed to be infinitely replayable.

That said, I've noticed a lot of reviews stating that this game is too punishing. It is true that, in some situations, you might play flawlessly but still be unlucky, making it quite hard or even impossible to complete a floor.

Common causes of wipes I've experienced are as follows:

- Dust drought where there isn't any dust for several doors in a row, and I don't have a Shop.
- Mobs that wreck your modules or open doors you don't want opened.
- Electromagnetic charges taking out critical rooms for a couple of doors.
- The game crashing.

It's very easy to be on a good streak, with tons of resources and dust, only for one of the doors to knock you on your ass. But honestly, I think part of the fun from this game is trying to work your way out of these bad situations. Sure, some of these wipes might be unavoidable, but I'd argue that quick thinking can save runs more often than not. Well, besides the game crashing, because you're not getting out of that.

One run, for example, I lost one of my best operators to a story event (yes, surprisingly, this game has lore!), and I was on the Armory Pod, meaning I was guaranteed to never get any more recruits - spending MOST of the pod with the same three characters with zero offensive modules, and only one of them had any decent damage output.

How did I manage? Well, for a start, you can operate any module with a Mechanical Pal, including shops, so I don't actually need one dedicated operator on every shop. I also discovered that Aftershave can actually be pretty good on Max O'Kane, letting him Pilfer doors safely in the dark as well as keep mobs from breaking down more of the doors. With some Neurostun and Tear Gas modules as well as giving him a Sonic Gun, he could also nearly infinitely block a passageway by repairing modules and killing any mobs that attack the front line of modules. Frankly, I realized I was under-utilizing Max O'Kane from the start by using him only for his Operate ability, and after fixing that, he basically carried the game.

You get so many cool little interactions like this with many different party complements that work out in so many different unique ways. This game is just so cool and so replayable! I love things like this.

If the game wasn't crashing randomly, I'd happily recommend it. It doesn't always crash (maybe once every 4-6 games), but it's often enough where it's ridiculously frustrating.

There is a really fun classic buried underneath this really rough PC game. Honestly, I'm utterly astonished Steam allowed this game to be sold in its current form, but here we are. It feels like some studio did the bare minimum to get it to run on a PC (and certainly not my PC), put the game on Steam, and totally moved on.

Let's get to the issues:
- For a start, just running the game is a challenge. On my Windows 11 machine, I had to install a third party library, IndirectInput, to get past the loading screen.
- Many modern controllers will not work, so you will probably be playing this on a keyboard. Getting Steam to even let you use a controller as a keyboard is hit-or-miss, so you might as well use the real thing.
- The Steam Overlay does not even work properly with this game a lot of times.
- The game is also really buggy when you tab out.
- If you play the game at 144 FPS, the game utterly breaks. Damage racks up extremely fast and boosting does not work.
- You can only play the game in full screen.

This game really would benefit from patches if the developers were willing to fix it.

And my goodness, when it all works (in its half functional, limited-to-60-FPS, keyboard-only, broken-exclusive-fullscreen, non-crashy glory), it is an amazing game that makes you shout "IT'S WORKING! IT'S WORKING!!"

I absolutely love playing this game just like I did on the Nintendo 64. The racing mechanics are so fun, and it's a really good grind to get into. The race tracks may not be anything special by today's standards, but tracks like Tatooine can be just so memorable.

But... is this game good enough to recommend? If it worked perfectly for me, I would have absolutely said "Yes! Buy this game NOW" because it is a really fun game that is actually priced reasonably for the content available on it. But it's just too broken to say that's a good idea right now.

I get a "Profile cannot be created." error message when attempting to create an online profile. This is required in order to play online. I intended to get this game to play with my friends.

This issue is apparently a very common issue that people have been getting for years which, to this day, still has no solution.

Why is this still being sold?

I'm torn.

I'll go into detail why, but basically: feel free to play this version for the eye candy and music, but play the 3D version for the better gameplay. Mainly the difficulty (and also the amount of content). The Pixel Remaster version is waaaaaaaaaay too easy and lacks any bonus content that was present in past installments.

Yes, the 3D version isn't perfect, either (the frame rate is awful, the visuals are pretty low resolution being that it's basically the Nintendo DS version, etc.), but it poses a pretty decent challenge and even gives you the option to play at an easier or harder difficulty if you choose, and it features quite a bit of extra content.

Overall, the pixel remaster is a decent release, sporting a fantastic OST and refreshing visuals, but it misses the mark in a few areas. See below.

• A fantastic OST. The original OST was already perfect, but Square Enix for whatever reason decided that not even perfect was enough for a proper remake. They were right.
  
• Great graphics. You may love or hate the new pixel art, as it isn't a 1:1 match of the original pixel art and there are a few tiling issues, but I personally ADORE these new graphics.
  
• QoL improvements. This version features a number of QoL improvements like auto battling and generous auto saving. Auto battling helps with grinding, not that this game actually requires grinding because of how easy it is. You can also use it in the boss fights, too. As for auto saving, this game does have some fairly long dungeons, so this can save you some time if you wipe to an enemy or get softlocked by Last Arm casting Electromagnetic Radation/Stop on your whole team. Note that similar features are also present on the 3D version, too.

• This version of the game is stupidly easy. The only difficult fight is the final boss in this game and only because he has a lot of HP. None of the other major boss fights (e.g. Golbez, archfiends, etc.) posed any challenge whatsoever. In fact, not even the (originally) extra hard OPTIONAL boss fights were actually hard. Perhaps this change was to make it accessible. Maybe they want to limit grinding. That's fine, but now it's actually way too easy to be overleveled. 2022-12-30: See "Edit" below - it seems this is just normal for 2D FF4. Really, the game does not have to be as hard as FF4 3D as that version often borders on 'unfair' if you play on the hardest difficulty, but a difficulty setting like in the 3D remake would be MUCH appreciated. Please!
  
• Missing features from other games. As is typical of the Pixel Remaster versions, this doesn't have features present the GBA or DS versions. This obviously doesn't make the game worse in a vacuum, but outside of accessibility, the Pixel Remaster releases aren't any better than versions that were put out before.
  
• The font used for text is too narrow. If it's hard to read on a PC, how does Square expect people to read it on their phones when they play the mobile version of it on an inherently smaller screen? It's really a minor complaint all things considered, and it apparently can be worked around.
  
• The frame pacing is not great. Is it 60 FPS? Steam's frame rate counter thinks so, but my eyes disagree. There's a bit of hitching somewhere in here as well as possible tearing. It's not vSync because I'm on a 144 Hz display.

You might like it, and I did like playing it, but the difficulty issue and the removed content are the main things that makes it impossible for it to be the definitive version Square Enix were going for.

Again, no, this game does NOT have to be hard. Goodness no. But when it's easy to accidentally clean through most of the major boss fights before the music even loops, it starts to get almost boring. Not so boring that the game is totally unfun, but enough to impact my enjoyment of the game.

And the removed features, in and of themselves, do not make the game worse as the original SNES versions didn't have these features. But my goodness, even with the QoL improvements, the game missing content and bordering on playing itself as far as difficulty goes makes it hard for me to click the "Yes" button as far as recommending the game goes.

At least the soundtrack is good. They did a brilliant job there. "Within the Giant" is so good that I stopped to listen to it in sheer awe when I first heard it. I wish that they made it so encounters didn't interrupt the music in these sections (heck, I'd consider changing the review to a "recommended" just for that alone haha).

I revised this review to be a bit more fair to it.

My main complaint was difficulty, so I went back and tried other versions as well as look at other people's thoughts of this version and older versions, and yeah, FF4, prior to the 3D remake, was generally around this easy, maybe even slightly easier. Also, while I did get experience points pretty easily, I did not actively seek to do so, and I was actually not overleveled when I fought the final boss. My party was level 51, except with Rosa at 53 and Cecil at 55, which is pretty average for this fight.

Does that mean it's the definitive version? Sadly no. I also noted that there are versions with more content, like the GBA and DS versions. But it is a decent representation of classic FF4, for better or for worse, and if that is what people want when they play this game, then I can't really fault the developers for making exactly that. My criticisms are still valid, so if you are looking for something with more kick to it and/or more content in general, I very much recommend the 3D remake. There's also the GBA version which has more content as well.

The Pixel Remaster version is fine as far as doing what it set out to do - make a more accessible version of the original Final Fantasy IV. However, I wish Square Enix would've put some of the content from past versions into these remakes to give it a more complete flavor. I'm not asking for much - just for stuff we already got at one point. When you give us even less and call it a "remaster", how can I recommend this?

The gist is, I can't really recommend this version of the game in its current state, and it would be dishonest to recommend something on the promise that it will "get better" some day, as it took so many years just to get to here.

As of season 7, the visuals are mostly fixed, but the audio, input, and gameplay issues still makes this version of the game worse than other versions of the game in a number of respects, even including the original, broken Gearbox port. It's very unfortunate that Halo: CE in 2021 is a "pick your poison" deal even after so many years.

As a bit of an aside, the modding tools introduced in season 7 were a nice addition (even if it was mostly what we already had, besides the tag test tool, more tags, and Sapien with fixed shaders), although those same issues are even worse in them for whatever reason. Also, the official game STILL does not support custom maps (you STILL have to replace existing maps and turn off anti-cheat).

Basically, it's a 2D battle royale game where you fight 63 other colorful animals to the death with guns and various melee weapons (lollipops, newspaper, fly swatters, pizza cutters, etc.). It's fun, cartoony, silly, and cute, and I love every bit of that. Oh, and this game penalizes death with random, bad animal puns, so prepare to get "diskoalafied" a lot.

The gameplay is very fun, and it's great when you get better at it! In fact, there are also a wide variety of weapons for different play styles, and most weapons have some sort of a more rare upgraded version:

• Do you like firing fast? Get an SMG (or Thomas Gun) or a Pistol (or Silenced Pistol)
  
• Do you like instantly destroying people up close? Grab a Shotgun (or JAG-7)
  
• Prefer to pick off people from a distance? Get a Hunting Rifle (or Sniper Rifle)
  
• Hunting rifle too slow? Get a Magnum (or Deagle)
  
• Want to track enemies? Get a Bow and Sparrow (or Sparrow Launcher)
  
• Want to remove multiple people from the game really fast? The minigun is super fun
  
• Like healing teammates or doing poison damage that completely ignores armor? Grab a dart gun
  
• Like explosions? Grab some grenades
  
• Don't like the delay on grenades? Get skunk bombs
  
• Want to infuriate your enemies with memes? Throw a banana to slip them, then grab a hamster ball and run them over

You have so many options for playing this game or trying new things. You can hold two weapons (besides melee and grenades), so try mixing and matching and see what you like most. There are no wrong answers here (though holding TWO shotguns probably isn't the best strategy, but you CAN do it if you want to!). It's not really a rock-paper-scissors sort of game, either, since you can hold both the "rock" and "scissors" at the same time.

There are also a wide variety of places to go in this game, and the map design overall is really good and has a lot of content in it for you to explore and find more stuff in. And, yeah, there's actually lore in this game! Cool, huh??

The community is also pretty good here, especially outside of the game, though the in-game chat pre-game can be... weird. Let's just say it's not moderated very well.

Community interaction is something the developers do a pretty good job at, and they're especially good with content creators like streamers and people who make videos.

The soundtrack by Jake Butineau is also really good. You can get it on Bandcamp or listen to it on Spotify or YouTube. I recommend giving it a listen!


This game is free-to-play. But spending money DOES grant you access to more content.

Here's the usual preface that the game makes clear: There is absolutely no gameplay advantage or incentive to actually spend money on this game. In fact, not even the free unlocks do anything to gameplay. Your character, gameplay-wise, is the same the first time you play the game as it will be the 1000th time. So, being a tap dancing cyberpunk tiger wielding a giant axe will not make you any more or less powerful than the default fox. And the Default Dance is the best dance, anyway!

HOWEVER, if you don't buy the Super Edition (around $15 at the time of writing this), some milestones (therefore, some unlockable cosmetics) are not available to you. Of course, the game will track your stats, so if you DO decide to buy it later, you can simply go back and click "Unlock" on all of the milestones you unlocked. Also, while there are loads of free stuff you can unlock, it's worth noting that Carl coins drop twice as much with the Super Edition, which means some of these free unlocks may take longer to get if you don't have it than if you did. I don't consider this one-time thing a "microtransaction" since it's a one-time purchase that gets you a large portion of the game.

But yes, like many free-to-play games (or even paid games nowadays), this game ALSO has a premium currency ("SAW tickets"). There are no gambling mechanics, and anything that can be unlocked through gameplay - which is most things - CANNOT be unlocked through microtransactions (and vice versa). Not everyone is OK with microtransactions (and if you aren't, you've probably made up your mind about the game at this point!), but it's at the very least an honest system Pixile has here.


This game is fun to play over and over again! While it has risen in popularity recently, it's not MASSIVELY popular yet, with typically only around 500-1500 players online depending on what time you play the game. So, you may find that games can often take between 2-4 minutes to fill. It does have bots, meaning you're going to be seeing people like "Dave from Sales" and "Not a bot" a lot in here. Bots provide a fair challenge, but once you figure out how they work, they're pretty easy to deal with (unless you're alone against a group of bots... oh dear).

So, I'm going to give this game a recommendation! The core gameplay is quite fun, and it's free, so there's nothing to lose by merely trying it. Other battle royales didn't really click for me, but this game sure does!

The games are good! The collection is not, and I cannot recommend it in its current state. I may re-review this game later when it's in a better state.

There are a large number of bugs with each of the games. Bugs that were not present in the original games.

Halo: Combat Evolved suffers the most from these bugs, and if you're getting MCC thinking you were going to get something better than Gearbox's 2003 release of Halo: Combat Evolved, you will probably be disappointed. At least that version of the game could be largely fixed with mods like Chimera and Refined. MCC, on the other hand, has anticheat, so even if you did fix the game, at best, you're only going to be allowed to play with friends (and friends of friends).

MCC, itself, also has a number of bugs (input issues, matchmaking issues, menu issues, achievement and stat issues, settings issues, chatting issues, etc.) as well as random, inconsistent crashes. Also, it is incredibly annoying to configure things like controls since the game insists on forcing you to have different control schemes for each game even if you don't want this.

As I said, the games in this collection are good, and with the exception of Halo: Combat Evolved, they mostly play like what you'd expect. However, it really would've been better if they released each game individually rather than making this broken amalgamation of games.

Also, while I'm well aware that 343 Industries says they plan on fixing it, reviewing a game based on how it will be in the future rather than how it is right now is disingenuous. And its current state is not very good.

This runs a bit better than the original and looks a bit nicer, too. It's not bug free, of course.

As for the game itself, you probably know what it is - it's Skyrim. There's tons to do, and there are lots of people to talk to... most of which were voiced by the same few people. And, of course, it comes with all the DLC, too!

Of course, you should also be aware that Skyrim originally came out in 2012, and many people have played through it before. Despite the improvements made to the game, it's still a remaster of that same 2012 game, and the core game is pretty much the same. If you're looking for an experience that is not Skyrim, don't get this. It's Skyrim.