Recent reviews by Kyrien

I can understand and accept you guys not supporting VR for the on foot content, but the least you could do, if you're going to ask your VR players to pay to get access to your new goodies - really, the very, very least - would be to provide graphics profiles and a keybind for switching between them, so I can take off my headset and press a button when going on foot, and then reverse that when getting back into an SRV or ship. The on foot content is unplayable with an HMD on and I am not going to go into my graphics options twice for every round trip between types of content, or pay you to take away the immersion I get from flying in VR. Refunded.

A pretty neat game overall. Newly in early access as I write this, and it shows, but already enjoyable. The only would-be dealbreaker I've noticed is that you can't remap the controls but I understand the devs are planning to correct that in the very near future. I'm hoping for more variety of ships as I unlock higher tiers, but either way I suspect that's something else that will be improved substantially over time. The physics are solid; I might wish for a better way to rotate a grappled item, but that's about it on that front. Efficiency when dismantling a ship has a visible impact on your end of shift earnings, and even without much in the way of upgrades it's possible to fight back the tide of debt, one fraction of a percentage point at a time.

The game hits the corporate dystopia theme pretty hard but stays amusing about it. For example, the low oxygen warning may warn that high CO2 levels can be dangerous to the company's equipment, or that suffering electrical damage has been shown to lower job satisfaction. Several of the equipment upgrades basically amount to removing safety features from the gear, too.

One thing to know, that's reasonably obvious but not spelled out in the tutorial: targeting something will display where you're supposed to send it at the bottom center of your screen. I slagged a thruster plate and bounced some plating off the barge before I realized that, because I am a smart person. Also, when it wants you to salvage a power cell from a ship, you'll need to cut into the bulkheads to fish it out; it's not mounted inside the cabin.

Oh, and regarding the comments about the 15 minute timer... at first I was leery of that too, but honestly I don't think the game would be as fun if you were systematically fishing every trivial scrap out of each derelict. You crack it open, pull out the tasty bits, then scarf up whatever else you have time for before moving on. It keeps the tedium to a minimum... and the time pressure can also push you to make mistakes, which is part of the thrill. I once efficiently detached the top and bottom plating from a ship, tethered it all into a processing bay... and only then realized one of those plates still had the reactor attached to it. Nooooo!

This game is a blast. I love the art style, the music is good, the characters and dialog are engaging, and the combat is fun. At first I was overly concerned with trying to mob enemies with all my characters simultaneously, thinking both that it was necessary to get good damage output (like juggle mechanics in some games) and that delaying would just give the enemies more chance to act. Kinda wrong on both counts; yes, it is advantageous to get in as many hits in a combo as possible - apparently the damage scales up for later hits - but its concept of a combo is generous. Essentially it only resets if you completely stop attacking, so you can go in with one character at a time as long as you don't pause much between them. There are extra benefits if you *actually* juggle an enemy in the air, though. Also, it seems that *everyone's* ATB stops - both you and the enemies - whenever anyone is busy attacking, so as far as I can tell the enemies aren't charging up to hit you so long as someone is punching them. You can afford to think a little and input more carefully.

I also enjoy the fantasy-game-ized Hindu mysticism that forms a core part of the game's lore. It's rich as source material and doesn't get used enough. Bonus factoid: 'Ajna', the main character's name, is also the name of the 'third eye' chakra, which is fitting considering how important hers seems to be.

Also, because it can't be said enough, Razmi is !@#$ing awesome. At least her personality/conversations; I'm not as much a fan of her in battle.

How? How is this game so fun?! I thought I'd play the demo for 20 minutes and get bored. Several hours later I'm grudgingly turning it off to go to bed an hour late. It's so cute and silly (especially given that all the guns are currently firing bananas for the April Fool's event) that I can't even get upset when I have an unlucky landing and die ten seconds later, and it's quite a rush when you win a round against a horde of other players. Also I have conclusively determined that the actual objective of the game is to Default Dance in sync with others while waiting in the lobby for the round to start.

Praise banan!

An amazing game, if difficult to categorize. You play the role of someone banished to a kind of real-world Purgatory for the crime of being literate. If that makes you question the respectability of the world's society and government, well, it should... and the game will give you the chance to do something about it, in the form of the Plan. I can't say very much about it beyond that - too much of the game is bound up in its developing story as you go along - but Pyre does a good job of making you feel like your struggle matters, both to the world in general and to the friends you're sending back to the Commonwealth in glory. Having to choose who to Liberate each cycle can grind at your soul, just imagining how the others are trying so hard not to plead with you, or wondering if they're slowly coming to hate you each time you pass them over, and it only gets worse as the cycles move on and a sense of real urgency gets added. It's the story that really drags you along, not the gameplay - although unlike a lot of people, I actually came to enjoy the Rites themselves, which are half spiritual struggle, half outlandish sportsball. The difficulty was fairly good, too, although perhaps it could have stood to have been a little harder. In the end I completed the game without ever losing a single Rite, and I never savescummed or the like, although there were a few times when I thought I was going to lose (and given how emotionally invested I got in liberating my friends, the thought was almost unbearable.) The music's quite good too, especially when Tariq and Celeste start singing one of their hymns during the Liberation Rite (which seriously adds to the mood!) The game is worth its list price; if you catch it going on sale, I strongly recommend you grab it.

This game is a masterpiece. Its portrayal of a struggle against madness and self-hate hit shockingly close to home. While I was never psychotic, I was driven nearly to suicide at one point in my life by my own failures, and I had to fight my own 'rot' for years to come after. I can well believe it was made with the help of people personally familiar with mental illness, and its portrayal of Senua's battle with hers makes me want to force my friends to play this. I had no objections to the combat, myself. You couldn't make a game entirely around that combat system, but as a vehicle to build tension and to convey the desperate violence of Senua's inner struggle, it's a perfect fit. The voice of Senua's 'shadow' (which I can't talk much more about without spoilers) reminded me so much of my own remorseless, hateful inner voice (who I called Dathien at the time) that it was simultaneously chilling and... cleansing, seeing the manifestation of my own mental damage so closely mirrored. The game is beautiful and immersive and terrifying, and... obviously I can't spoil the ending, but I will say that it is correct. If you've ever been to war with your own mind, or know someone who has... play this. Please.

This game is phenomenal! It provides a satisfying intellectual challenge while allowing you to say 'screw this' and throw together a huge, complicated, inefficient solution when you just can't seem to find an elegant one. In other words, no more getting stumped and flipping your table, which is what happened to me eventually with Infinifactory. It provides an interesting story as you go along, making you feel like you're doing more than satisfying some nigh-faceless alien taskmasters, and if the later, more complicated design requirements get frustrating, you can always go back and try to further refine an earlier solution, to compete against your friends, the community at large, or just yourself. It's also VERY polished, so much so that I'm not entirely sure why the developer is bothering to call it Early Access. The ability to generate animated gifs of your more visually pleasing solutions, to keep as trophies or with which to tantalize your friends, is a very neat perk (and a devilishly clever advertising mechanic; staring at a few of my friend's solutions is what led me to buy the game myself.) 10/10; if you like open-ended puzzles and programming-style control mechanics, this is the game you want.

I don't normally post reviews, but for QuiVR I just had to. This is easily my favorite game for my new Vive! The visuals are great, the immersion is top-notch, the core archery mechanic is spot on, and the abilities are interesting and impactful without drastically lessening the difficulty. The limiting factor on my play time isn't boredom, but my arms getting too tired to keep shooting accurately! Which is, by the way, a good thing - even though it's not billed as a fitness game, I'm getting more exercise from it than I have from Wii games intended for the purpose, because I want to just keep playing! And that's with it in its Early Access state. There's only one map currently (as far as I can tell), and there are a couple bugs involving the equipment mannequin in the keep displaying the wrong items' info and the reforge/disenchant altar becoming unresponsive. Once those minor glitches are fixed and the developer puts in more variety, it might actually eat my soul.

This. This is awesome. The controls are solid, the different ball-characters feel unique, and the equipment upgrades are impactful. Well, most of them at least. It even manages an epic boss battle sequence at the end. I'd never have thought an RPG could be successfully turn into a series of pinball tables!

I came across WTFast from a Reddit suggestion on how to deal with lag issues in Final Fantasy XIV. There seems to be a bad hop between me and their data center; whether this is just a hardware issue or some internet 'fast lane' nonsense as rumors claim, I can't say. The consequences were bad; the game had become nearly unplayable. However, before actually running WTFast, I stopped to read the reviews... and quickly uninstalled it, frightened by what I was reading.

This was a mistake.

A friend suggested I give it a try after all. As close as I was to losing a very valuable source of entertainment, I decided it was worth taking the risk of having to root out malware, if the worst of the claims proved true. Once I figured out what I was doing wrong in setting it up, it *instantly and totally* fixed my connection problems, routing me around the bad hop. No more erratic lag. No more packetloss. I can enjoy my game again.

Some of those negative reviews may be honest, I don't know... but I'm fairly sure at least some of them are spurious. If so, whoever's posting them is doing the gaming community a major disservice. For the class of issues it's intended to address, this tool is a godsend. And yes, it was dumb and wrong of them to try to buy good reviews, but I imagine they saw it as a form of self-defense, and didn't think of the bigger picture. They didn't buy this one. They didn't have to. Thanks, guys.