Recent reviews by Vash

I am indeed leaving a review for an H game demo, but I believe. I like what's there (the demo is insanely short) but I think the idea kinda owns? I love Pokemon Snap, this seems to be headed in the right direction.

Please add an option for headbob, and an option to disable drunk vision. Very motion sick. Game seemed neat though.

I think all of the praise that Balatro has received is basically stolen valor from Slice & Dice. Slice & Dice is one of the best to do it since Slay the Spire. I cannot recommend Slice & Dice more, it's insane bang for buck, the mobile version is amazing. The options are very nice. Interacting with the game is an absolute pleasure. Please, buy Slice & Dice.

We played the hell out of it and enjoyed it. Could really use some more content overall but I kind of worry for where they have to go from here because of how high tier stuff already feels but we will see.

The game owns, buy it.

When Dome Keeper is on sale, I think it's a great pickup. The game plays fairly well. One of my only gripes is with the difficulties, which I think could use some tuning (mostly the hardest difficulty should be adjusted down a little, or the second hardest up a little.)

One thing that's nice about the game is that a lot of upgrade paths seem viable, and it seems like there's a decent amount of flexibility.

Hopefully, more content is added because as it is runs do become quite a bit samey after a bit, but the game is $20 and especially with what they've already added (new map size, new entirely unique character, new enemies, new modifiers) the game is pretty good value wise. Especially on sale, if it's on sale I'd say that the game is an EASY recommend to buy.

I did not think that I would enjoy the endless mode that is in the game as I'm not usually one for leaderboards but I was very surprised when I got kind of into it. So if you're like me, then keep that in mind and don't let it dissuade you from this game!

The game also plays quite well on Steam Deck.

This game is so inferior to the first in just about every way that it's hard to really summarize in a review. Please, just go play the first game.

Back 4 Blood has been updated and You can check the comment for an update on my review.

Back 4 Blood is not irredeemable, but in its current state I cannot recommend anyone buys this game, especially at $60.

For reference, I am an avid fan of: Zombie games, and co-op games. I've played Left 4 Dead 1/2, Deep Rock Galactic, Payday 1/2 just to name a few. I love zombie games, this cannot be understated.

I had to cut this review down to fit steam, you can find the full version (though still not encompassing) in this pastebin: https://pastebin.com/XFn4pMrr

Part of the beauty of Left 4 Dead and the other games, is that they're very easy for people to jump in on.
When you want to play Left 4 Dead, it's as easy as firing the game up and inviting the friends.
Back 4 Blood people need to check characters, decks, talk about cards and weapons so as not to step on each other's toes. This also means, that playing the game with randoms (people you don't know) is absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥. Some of this is fine, in that it's not necessarily a bad thing to have a more complicated game with builds and whatnot, the problem is that the game in many ways can easily lessen these pains but either they didn't think of any of this, or they were negligent, either way the pain is passed onto the player. That said, this isn't a problem if you play on the easiest difficulty, which leads us into another of the game's core problems.

Back 4 Blood has 3 difficulties. Recruit, Veteran and Nightmare. Recruit is braindead easy, so easy that none of us were actually able to enjoy playing it. Veteran is more challenging, but so much more challenging that we found it too difficult for our group. Mind you, most of us are experienced in these games. Nightmare is awful but we'll talk about that later. So, playing the game on Recruit is very boring but doesn't necessarily require any setup. Veteran is not as boring, but comes with the issue of requiring "pre-gaming" with the people you want to play with (something that is basically impossible with randoms mind you, as you can't do this before matchmaking). We ended up playing through on Recruit because we didn't want to go through the work of beating it on Veteran because we already weren't having a lot of fun.

Back 4 Blood has an obsession with taking concepts from the genre and ruining them. Back 4 Blood has 3 special infected, and then each of those special infected have 3 variants. Each variant has minor visual and audio changes that really show that they have not played another game in the genre. Left 4 Dead and Payday make sure that their special infected are all distinct. When a hunter spawns, it's given a unique audio cue, it sounds different, and you cannot mistake any of the other infected for it. Especially on the audio front, where Back 4 Blood is VERY BAD. Guns, infected, characters all fall flat in this area. As of now, I do not think that one of the people we played with could pick out which of the special infected variants were which. I don't blame them because the idea is very dumb.

The other games do at least try to encourage the team aspects through simplicity. In Left 4 Dead there's no worrying about ammo usage because you're not taking the ammo from anyone else. Even when thinking about the special ammos everyone gets to use it. Back 4 Blood opts to have non universal ammo, which means that now, if you want to use rifles and so does everyone else, you're going to run into some problems. Again, not an issue with pre-planning or on the easiest difficulty. But if you don't enjoy the other guns, now you've just introduced conflict into the team based game. There is a lot the game could do to help ease some of this. It would be nice if the inventory would show what ammo types your teammates are using, it would be nice to be able to ping and request ammo. This honestly goes for a lot of aspects of the game, like healing. Back 4 Blood's card system allows for people to specialize into healing, but does absolutely nothing to help encourage the team to play around it. For most cards, the healer has to be the one who does the healing to get any benefit, but the game doesn't have any built in way to help you communicate that to your team. Yes, typing/mic exist, but again it just adds friction. There are many ways to help smooth these things over, at the very least it would be nice if teammates could have any idea what cards their teammates have taken. These are things that you should do if you decide to take on the task of adding depth to your game.

As stated before, we were not having fun on Veteran. This is in large part due to how Back 4 Blood handles its difficulty. Back 4 Blood is mostly difficult because the game has an unhealthy obsession with high health Special Infected, sending a lot of them at you, and giving you next to nothing in return. The card system, which we were initially worried about the most, ended up being way better than expected. The problem is that it is problematic in design, and simultaneously under, and over utilized.
The game suffers from the decision that you build a deck of 15 cards and then are given one of those each chapter. The idea is that cards will add a lot of replayability, but that doesn't really make much sense because you always get your deck in a set order. So there's next to no variance there. You can find random cards to purchase in levels, but this varies in frequency a lot. But it's never enough to differentiate it enough to feel replayable. I wish that the developers had leaned into this more, and made it far more frequent so as to encourage more decisions on the fly in levels on how to direct builds, allowing for more growth of the player to match the absurd amount of specials that are thrown at them, and in general just to make the game a bit more fun. The versus mode even has a system like this, where you can use a tool kit to open a crate in order to get an additional (random) card pull from your deck. I have no idea why this isn't just in the campaign. It's a no brainer to me and I think would actually help with a lot of the game's problems. The hardest parts of the game are near the start of acts (campaigns) where you have so few cards from your deck but the game is scaled like you have more. Part of the problem that this creates is that mediocre cards aren't allowed to exist. This would be alleviated if there were ways to earn more card picks from your deck (along with a deck increase) because then each individual card loses some weight, but gives a lot more room to breathe for each card so that you don't have to stack the deck with 15 really good cards and can have some wiggle room. But, this is beyond the thinking capabilities of Back 4 Blood.

Nightmare is a mess. Nightmare is not fun, the people that tell you it is fun are insane. While Nightmare is not impossible (it has been beaten), it is not fair. As of right now, the most effective way to beat Nightmare is speedrunning. To be fair, this is a problem in Left 4 Dead as well. Also to be fair, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that we maybe fix some of the problems that a 12 year old game had. Speedrunning is so effective because dealing with the systems in this game with how much Nightmare turns them up is so outrageously harder than simply running by them. Avoidance is simply too strong. And sure, they may nerf speedrunning to fix this, but I think that this is more a sign of other problems. What I would very much rather they do is REWARD PLAYERS for playing the game. Please, allow for more looting, more things to purchase in levels with copper like more team upgrades or maybe even letting people purchase more CARD picks from their deck. More optional objectives (not speedrunning) that give substantial rewards for doing them.

Admittedly, Chancer and I did not play the game for too long, and this review is based on our experiences back in December of 2020, so please take this review with that in mind.

We did not enjoy the game, frankly we found it boring. The gameplay felt fairly slow, slow movement and slightly spongey enemies. We would get different weapons, but besides maybe one or two none of them really clicked with Chancer or I. Across our couple of runs, we mostly ran in to the same enemies, guns, and passives. There are multiple factors here that probably make this worse. We died to the first boss on every run, and we just started so there is potential that some of these problems stem from roguelite unlocks and roguelite progression.

That said, we would (what felt like) crawl through to the first boss and then die to him without really understanding what we should be doing differently to not die. Most of the rooms were fairly straight forward but some of them felt like they took forever and we just weren't sure what else we were supposed to be doing. We did the challenge rooms and found chests in rooms so I'm not sure what else we were supposed to be doing.

The game has a meta currency, but it is used for upgrading your character's stats which, personally, I was not a fan of. The upgrades were very minor and I didn't get too excited pumping into them. From what I saw it seemed like the game had a ton of unlocks, but I wasn't too excited when I saw them as they mostly looked like grinding "kill X Y times".

Overall my criticism of the game boils to: I was bored and didn't know how to have fun with the game. If the problems that we faced were truly unlock/progression induced, I wish that the game started with more stuff unlocked or some of the progression instead. Or, at least, increase the speed of the game at the start.

Edit: I have changed my review to recommend the game for now. I appreciate that the devs responded and their response gives me hope. So I will change it to positive and try it again at a later date and update the review then.

I did not like the game. I am a fan of Co-op oriented games, and have gone so far as to say that all games are made better by Co-op. I love difficult games, I often try to play on harder difficulties and I also am a fan of games playing with lighting as a mechanic. Lastly, I like slower paced games.

With all of that said, I was expecting GTFO to kind of be a perfect storm for me, and yet I asked for a refund.

Ultimately, I find the game to be too slow, but I think it's better explained as needlessly slow. Rooms are very large but contain little loot or enemies, movespeed feels on the lower side out of combat, and I couldn't get any tab autocompletes to work in ingame terminals.

As I mentioned that I refunded the game, in my 117 minutes of gameplay I wasn't able to complete the mission with 2 friends, one experienced while the other and myself were not. Part of this, in my opinion, is due to the game having too little ammo. I like ammo management, but I do not personally find it engaging in GTFO. Stealthing the game, which helps you conserve ammo, I consider more tedious than engaging, looting I find to be very boring, as it's a lot of nothing with some things sprinkled, and things you want being fewer.

I didn't enjoy the game's darkness, I didn't feel that the visual impairments added to the game, and moreso made looting and other such things more annoying. Personally, I find that Deep Rock Galactic does a far better job of playing with the light levels, but the two games are of different scopes.

I was a little disappointed to find out that the game doesn't have very much in the way of unlockable progression, as I feel like with it's difficulty it would be neat to unlock some rewards for it. But this is moreso a personal gripe on my part.


Overall, I find that GTFO is plauged with tedium. Stealthing is tedious, looting is tedious, moving is somewhat tedious, looking around is tedious. Hopefully, as the game receives updates this review will become a joke with how off the mark it is.