Recent reviews by Thor

I recently picked up Titanfall 2 on sale, having been a fan of the first but never finding time for the second. I'm sad to say that while the gameplay is fun, the game's multiple is currently inaccessible due to DDOS attacks combined with Respawn Entertainment's inability (or negligence) to prevent them.

The Game
The single-player and multiplayer provide fast, dynamic, and action-packed gameplay that's endearing to the series, with advanced movement techniques being a large part of the game's draw over other shooters like CoD or Battlefield. The graphics, sounds, and gun feel are all excellent, and there is plenty of unlocks to keep you playing for hours on end.

The Problem
Titanfall 2's server structure currently has a severe weak-point in that DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are crippling the servers the game attempt's to spin up for players. Several weeks have passed since this began; Respawn Entertainment's parent company, Electronic Arts, has made nary a peep about resolving the issue.

If you bought this game for the multiplayer, I recommend immediately refunding it before the Steam two-hour window is up.

Dungreed, a rogue-lite metroidvania possesses charming graphics and some engaging gameplay with room for growth. However, there are some issues with the mechanical aspects of gameplay, so be aware before you purchase:

+Plenty of weapons and items to augment your runs, swords, guns, magic, shields, minions, and modifiers allow you to make some interesting builds.
+Large variety of bosses to hone your strategies against, every level ends with a unique boss, though some bosses tend to be more luck-based or cause a spike in difficulty.
+New Game Plus, Quick-Start, lots of options in Settings, the game is more accessible compared to similar rogue-lites.
-Auto Aim does not consider terrain or weapon type, arcing weapons will not compensate in auto-aim mode. This makes using a controller harder than it should be as the AI makes some very bad choices when auto-aiming, and not using Auto-Aim is detrimental unless you're using a mouse.
-Muddled projectile graphics: Certain enemies have projectiles that are hard to recognize, or prepare for, including enemies that fire from off screen.
-Weapon randomization or ‘weighting’ is very poor, you’ll see the same 20 weapons and items every run despite there being hundreds of weapons.
-Elemental attacks not well thought out: Poison, Fire, & Electricity all tend to be subpar secondary-effects, even when you have items equipped to improve them.

Overall, if you like rogue-lites and metroidvanias, then this game should satisfy the average player for ~20 hours depending on their skill level. There's always room for improvement, but that goes for every indie game.

Katana Zero’s core gameplay loop is best described as a mashup of RONIN and Hotline Miami (both produced by Devolver Digital,) But whereas the former puts more emphasis on tactical slashing, and the latter is a chaotic twitch shooter, K-Zero adds-in additional game modes that just fail to live up to the core loop.
Core Gameplay Loop – Hack, Slash, throw objects, slow down time, and dodge roll your way to victory. The game offers plenty of ways for you to approach its puzzles while allowing you to reset instantaneously (ala Hotline Miami.)
Graphics – Classic pixel that’s best described as a hybrid between Hotline Miami and RONIN, it’s aesthetically pleasing and provides enough clarity at all times for you to understand what’s going on.
Stealth missions - Game breaking and absolutely atrocious, enemy AI will sometimes make it impossible to get through certain doorways due to overlap. The developer implemented AI sight-vision so you know how far horizontally and vertical enemies can see, but then fails to display or even tell you that enemies will also detect you via audio. This becomes a severe issue when you already have a small window to move between enemy sightlines, now you also have to guess when you can pop out of a backroom without alerting the passing guard to your presence. Additionally, stealth missions are also timed, meaning that even if you take the most viable route, you may still fail to get out in time.
Story Scenes – A minor issue, but there’s some frivolous world building in the story beats. After every chat with your psychologist, you have to slowly walk out of the room. Just end the scene instead! If you have a story where you just got hit by a bus, don’t start by describing how you woke up to your alarm in the morning and brushed your teeth!

I want to like this game, but I ultimately shelved it after running through the first no-skill stealth section (avoiding the police in the prison) due to running out of time despite not having the ability to stealth any faster. Both RONIN and Hotline Miami do their respective genres better than this mashup solely because they stick to them. If the devs can tighten the story beats and the stealth gameplay, then this game would be excellent. Until then, I just can’t recommend it.

Octogeddon has a lot of the DNA of the author’s previous game, Plants Vs Zombies. But whereas PvZ is finely tuned in balance towards casual and hardcore play, Octogeddon suffers from too much RNG and lack of complexity.

• Colorful graphics very reminiscent of Plants Vs Zombies, light-hearted storyline and somewhat diverse enemy types will allow you to enjoy the main story as you progress through multiple cities that need to be crushed.
  
• Music and game-sounds are top-notch and a lot more heavy-metal than Plants Vs Zombies.
  
• Weapon Choices: There’s a ton of unique, different weapons, each with their own upgrades.

• Limited Replay value: there’s no real synergy between the different types of weapons you get.
  
• Certain weapons are nearly useless: Angler-Light deals no damage and has shorter range than it’s upgraded form. The Snake-Cobra line of weapons is a newbie trap, they have extremely short range when compared to other, more useful weapons. The fully upgraded version costs way too much for the lack of range it has.
  
• Gold Scarcity: Until you unlock all the permanent upgrades, you really feel the squeeze of not having enough gold to be able to function on the current level, this is made worse by not having the upgrades you need for said level (Not having light for cloaked enemies, not having the elephant for reflecting jellies etc.)

• RNG is very unfriendly to casual play: if you progress through the storyline too fast, the next replay will throw advanced enemies at you that require expensive upgrades to combat.
  
• Cloaked Enemies: I don’t know how this enemy ability made it past beta-testing. It’s not fun to be stuck with no light or the just the angler-light because you have to highlight the enemy; then rotate to hit them with another weapon. This would be better if players could at least do half-damage to cloaked enemies, or have an ability to put the light on their cursor.
  
• Too Much Visual Noise: Once you get 5+ heads, it becomes hard to track the various bullets/enemies flying into you at close range.
  
• Lack of Complexity: It’s a two-button game when it could have done more. You can get up to three ‘pets’ with unique abilities, but they all have to be cast at the same time instead of being bound to individual hotkeys or buttons.
  
• Near-Zero Interaction: There’s nothing to click on once in a level. I feel there’s a lost chance to have some interesting mechanics where you need to ‘pull’ armor off a mob so your tentacles can do damage, or even make the mouse a ‘mobile light’ for those unfun stealth enemies.

In the end, this game has the potential to be fun, but even with 9-hours played, the repetition of shallow gameplay leaves much to be desired.

My Suggestion: Get it on sale, or wait for it on phone.

This game is the ultimate mixed bag of good and bad ideas, unfortunately the frustrations from some bad-design decisions keep this game from being a favorite for me.

• It takes ages to do anything due to animations. There is no fast-forward function to bypass the 100+ animations the dealer makes every game, or the ‘zoom’ whenever facing off against enemies.
  
• No level Preloading, hope you like loading screens because this game doesn’t load more than one ‘scene’ at once.
  
• Janky Reaction System, trying to dodge a bullet? Sometimes no matter what direction you press, your idiot character will dodge-dive right into an attack.
  
• Bad UI System, you have to click on the text in the upper left of the screen, and then click on “Continue” in the lower-right repeatedly… like every action you take requires 1-2 unneeded clicks. Example: The Temple Prayer card gives you a blessing if you pay money. After the blessing, it gives unneeded text saying ‘you’ve been blessed’ instead of just returning back to the table.

• Engaging story progression system, every card is an encounter, if you make it through that storyline, you keep those cards to influence future encounters.
  
• Moderate number of weapons/armor/rings etc, this game gives you plenty of options to fight with, though animations don’t change outside of the three primary disciplines (Dual-Wielding, Two-Handed, or Sword and Board.)
  
• Varied storylines mean no two adventures are the same. Each one is like it’s own mini-D&D adventure.

All in all, this game would be better if the developers did some optimization to the systems in place. Taking forever to progress through a storyline and then getting an unlucky string of failures is the worst feeling ever. Insult to injury, you have to watch the failure screen for like 10 seconds, before the dealer spends 20 seconds putting the cards back, before you can select a new storyline and then spend another 20 seconds watching the dealer begin the storyline.

One word to best describe this game: Frustrating.

Skeet is a great FREE game for people with stairs in their house. Just load up your shotguns and and go to town on some dastardly targets. It's like Duckhunt without all the nostalgia, who needs that stuff anyways, seriously duckhunt was a bad game, I hated that dog.

Once you get the method of reloading double-barrels, you too will be able to say "I am protected" from VR home invaders.

Take the ship and KB/M movement that made Freelancer so good.
Then dabble in some upgradable ship systems similar in scope to Faster than Light.
Finally, add roguelike elements like one-life per-run, or “anything can happ…oh my god did a frigate and a corvette just drop in on me?” randomized moments.

Mix, stir, and simmer these elements to produce the core gameplay of Everspace.


Light on story, heavy on fun.

Hands down the best “simple life” simulator you can get. There’s various ways to play the game so you don’t even have to farm if you chose to: Mining, Fishing, Foraging, and Livestock are all well-thought out options. Gameplay is reminiscent of the classic SNES Harvest Moon in which time-management is critical to play: time in game moves at a break-neck pace, requiring you to thoughtfully plan out your actions each day. So don’t come into this expecting a Facebook farm-simulator, this is an actual game with challenge.
What also makes this game special is its development by a single developer, visuals, audio, coding, music, all done by one person over the course of four years. The amount of sprite variations is daunting given that each sprite can change based on time, day, season, and weather. The entry fee is well worth the gameplay, so low its literally unheard of by indie developer standards.

I wouldn’t recommend this game to pure casual players, or players looking for something more than a resource simulator. Stardew Valley faithfully sticks to its core vision as the SNES Harvest Moon everyone wanted but never received. It just took one man’s vision to make it a reality.

Game still holds up rather nicely after all these years. Graphics may peg it as the first Source-Engine title ever, but don’t let it’s antiquated looks fool you, the gameplay is solid and lengthy, the replayability is superb (Tons of classes to try) and the community-support through patches is amazing. You can play the game it was meant to be played 5-6 times, then switch to a modified version that adds tons of additional items and dialogue that was originally cut from the game.

One could call this a reimagining of the original Sanctums run and gun tower defense gameplay. For those who played the original changes include enemies that actively attack you if you get too close, walls are now low enough for towers to be able to shoot across multiple rows and also make it harder for you to avoid attacks. Most towers are air and ground now. Weapons are now split into classes, and you can only carry four tower types so as to encourage team-work.
For new players and beginners, if you enjoy FPS combat and Tower Defense, then this is a great fusion of the two. Balance is perfect between towers and player weapons so as to ensure contribution from both. You also have the option of inviting three other friends for a chaotic good time of setting up towers and shooting monsters in the face.