Recent reviews by Tejan

I nominated this for best story for the Steam Awards in 2024. Not because I think it has the best story, but because I haven't played many games released this year.

As for a real review of the game. It's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the form of a Quake mod. I've had fun playing it so far.

This game is genuinely NOT finished. Do not let the v1.0 fool you!

The only good thing about the game, as of me writing this during the 1.0 release, is the art. Characters looks amazing, the UI is clunky but looks really good, and the environments are extremely good looking.

The bad part is pretty much everything else. A quick list:

• Animations often times just don't work. Villagers will walk backwards or sideways. Picking up things from the ground or from trees will only sometimes play an animation.
  
• The hitbox for where you can interact is placed in a really weird spot, or something. It's insanely hard to do the farming tasks because where you need to position yourself to interact isn't where you'd expect. (I think this is because the character's height is about 2.5 "blocks" high and I think the interact hitbox is in that .5 range.)
  
• Others have mentioned it, but the economy is just broken right now. Fruit trees respawn on screen transition. With a non-optimal route I can make over $10,000 an in-game day and this is without interacting with any of the farming aspects.
  
• The hundreds of tree scavenging items also brings up an issue with the in-game relationship system, you can give multiple items to people in a day. I managed to max out 3 relationships in 3 in-game days (Solely because I was still trying to make the $10,000 in a day as well.). Also, there's no benefit to the relationship system AT ALL. I have 3 maxed out relationships and I've received nothing for it: no items, no recipes, no events, nothing at all.
  
• Also also, speaking about the relationships. There was a marriage system planned that now seems to have been scrapped, but I came across a line in the game from one of the villagers that said something like, "This is a nice place to grow old. You might even manage to find love here." which is quite the tone-deaf line to leave in.
  
• There's many more things I could complain about, but I'm already rambling.

I haven't followed the development of the game at all despite I buying the game very early into it's development. Others will be able to explain issues with the development and broken promises from the devs better than me, because I just wasn't following that stuff.

Echo Point Nova is an insanely fun and intense FPS that constantly keeps you engaged, much like Greylock's previous game. Of the two games, I feel Severed Steel still feels much more refined and better to play, but the freedom of movement in this game is just such a blast.
If you've played Severed Steel before there's been a few foundational changes tot the formula that makes this game feel incredibly fresh, even for someone that has over 20 hours in Severed Steel. The biggest change by far is having a weapon loadout, being able to on the fly swap to another gun when one runs out changes the entire flow of the game, no longer do you need to kill your flow when you run empty on your gun. As far as movement goes all they essentially did was replace the dive with a grapple hook, added the ability to fast-fall, and made wall-running infinite and able to go straight upwards. Though the biggest change to flow of the game is them moving the slow-mo to an ability that only charges when you move at max speed and can only be used when fully charged, so instead of almost all the kills being slow-mo kills you now only get slow-mo maybe once or twice an encounter. All of these combined make the game maybe not feel better than Severed Steel, but it feels distinctly different and a lot of fun in a different way.

As far as downsides go there is quite a few.
Much like Severed Steel, this game is short. I have 10 hours of playtime, maybe 2 of those hours were me leaving the game open, and I've 100%'d all the launch content. That being said, this isn't an inherently bad thing, because with this game, unlike Severed Steel, I never felt like putting it down because it's was just so easy to flow from one area to the next.
I was playing solo on the hardest difficulty and I can honestly say I never felt challenged by the game. The only time I had trouble with any of the missions was the post-game missions that add modifiers like One Hit Kills or Nightmare Enemies. That might just be due to my experience with Severed Steel though, because a lot of the gunplay from that game translates directly over.

It's just Hitman/Deus Ex/Lara Croft GO, but using it's own IP.

By no means does that make it bad, but you could get all 3 of those games for the price of this single game and while the story in this one is original it's, as of an hour in, also just not good. Get it if you are super into puzzle games and can't find anything else or absolutely loved the Ubi GO games, if you don't fall into either group just skip it.

The original was an interesting take on people avoiding reality, with a made up one. This "reboot" instead is completely in it's own reality.
Where the first one was a short game that had the ultimate message of "Go touch grass.", this one's message is... Don't be a super genius that creates the most advanced AI ever known?

Not directly comparing this to the previous one, it's a okay visual novel. Not amazing, not awful, but not above the tier of anything you could find free online. The only things that make this stand out are the voice acting and, admittedly, pretty good art. The writing isn't good and they would have benefited from having a proofreader involved in the project, because there were hundreds of errors in the script.
If it was free, maybe I'd recommend it, but for a product that costs actual money, no this isn't worth it. Just play the original one.

Got this in a Humble Bundle and was drawn to try it because of the art style, the game itself is just... not that good.

The combat is just plain unfun, to me. My biggest complaint is that the only way to do any meaningful damage is to use what is effectively your sub-weapons, your different weapons you can put on heavy attack. There's a whole combo system that you could easily and reliably get a 15 hit combo using your light attacks, but all of those hits are worth less than a single hit from your starting heavy attack weapon, all light attacks are good for is generating mana to use the heavy attack, but even then if you get an execute, which only triggers if you get enemies below a certain amount of health, you usually make back more mana than you used. Also, aside from the uppercut, which launched the enemies, the light attacks don't put any enemy type into hitstun, so if you open with a raw light attack you're usually going to be getting hit instead as the enemy just shrugs it off.
Also, parries just don't feel right. I was practicing on the first enemy in the game, because he has a very obvious attack warning flash and it's easy to count when the attack should hit, to land the parry timing, but it honestly feels like the timing constantly changes. I think it's because the hitbox for the parry is VERY close to your body, perhaps just the size of your body's hurtbox, which means there's changes to the timings of every parry because slight distance changes can result in you getting hit at different times.

Overall, in playing this game I just kept thinking back to Valdis Story and how, while not as a visually striking, it hits all of the things I hoped this game would have, but didn't.

Genuinely not worth money. There are hundreds of free games with just as good stories that have a meaningful payoff as an ending.

The game is fun and I enjoy it.... but they added a battle pass after launching and they're DMCAing mods, that's making me leave this negative review.

This game just isn't fun.

Congrats to the students that made this you've accomplished something most people in the world haven't done. That being said anyone not associated with the school has no reason to play this. This game feels less like a small team of students that are passionate about making games making something they love and more like reading entries from a middle school or high school short story contest that students were told they'd get a better grade in class if they just entered something.

Since this is a student project here's some constructive criticisms in no real order:
Controlling your main character feels, pretty good at first, but once terrain is uneven you'll get caught on sticking out bits, or stairs, and stop moving. Because of this I spent most of my time on foot in this game mashing spacebar to avoid any floor geometry I could get caught on.
While summoning the boat is really nice, there's no reason to make the button to summon it should default to a main button. Take the Witcher 3 for example, you call your horse with X (on KB+M) or double clicking L (on controller). This means you're much less likely to accidentally hit the button. Defaulting it to F, which is the "Use" key for many games, just means there was a lot of times I'd go to grab a collectible only to have to sit there watching my ship get summoned, which leads to another complaint.
Summoning the ship shouldn't completely lock you out of all movement. I get you're proud of animation of it coming out of the ground, but you could have easily sped up that animation 2 or 3 times and made it so that you weren't locked in a summoning animation.
Speaking of locking, locking the camera whenever a text box comes up was a pretty poor choice. Almost all my conversations with the floating lady she wasn't in frame and I couldn't turn to look at her.
Gameplay as a whole is my biggest complaint, there's no evolution to the game at all. The first puzzle temple is just as hard as the third and there's not even any new mechanics added to spice things up. Which honestly would be fine if those were well done, but all the systems in this game are just barely functioning. Like I mentioned before, you constantly get caught on floor geometry while walking around, jumping is floaty and imprecise, vaulting/mantling sometimes chooses to not work, and the swinging mechanic is probably one of the worst I've ever had to use.

Also, I experienced three glitches where I feel out of the maps and also fell into unclimbable pits twice, leading to five quits to the main menu to get out.

This game is the game dev equivalent "You can copy my homework, just change it up a bit." It's just Celeste, but worse in every aspect.