Recent reviews by grimphoenix

$6 dopamine simulator, with a demo, try it, buy it, love it. its so worth the price.

Whelp
I almost really liked this game, even through the easy anticheat that was not clearly disclosed (EAC is basically a virus, and completely ineffective but companies still use it to feel good about themselves)
Gameplay is ok, really feels like a 360 gears of war style 3rd person shooter, though due to the melee focus and breath of different abilities the controls sort of suck, right click to melee middle mouse to zoom in for shooting is a war crime. I suggest you use whatever control scheme you use in warframe, it should feel fairly natural.
the issue that broke my back was about 3 hours in as counted by steam(i left it standing in the menu to have lunch) a boss broke. notably the lichter, the invisible guy.
for some reason his invincibility was not untriggering, he cannot take damage. I spent an hour trying to fix this crap, I tried everything I could think of aside from deleting my entire save to fix this guy, it did not work.
and now my valid refund is being denied. because I let it sit in the menu. at this point I do not want to delete my save and restart, I just want to wash my hands of this game after I crawl through my computer to purge EAC, but it won't let me. I will update this review if the support changes their decision.
Repeatedly denied refund, rethinking and whelp, spent a hundred bucks on this game before realizing all the issues, will reinstall and reevaluate. however no matter how I review my review the thumbs down stays until the refund policy is addressed, I have played games longer and had refunds but this company seems to be sending automated denials.
Edit:
Have still been playing, I have no idea what caused the original glitch, but funny enough increasing the difficulty fixed it, weird, if this is happening to you on normal, try hard.
the review remains negative due to the sheer BS of automated denials of refund requests not covered exactly by the steam policy.
but the game itself is good, if you are ok with EAC (♥♥♥♥ eac, getting rid of it would save this company money and make the game exactly the same difficulty to hack, eac has been cracked for years.) and the fact that your refund will be automatically denied regardless of how valid it is, the game is fun and feels like the old ps3 cover shooters of the mid 2000s.

I booted
got spammed with a ton of information
clicked the glowing button
got put into "bootcamp" basically baby mode
thought the game was fun
realized progression wasn't working
tried the real game
got killed repeatedly by a bunch of people with guns and attachments I didnt have access to, that gave them 1/5 the ttk of the gun I grabbed off the ground
game sucks.

This game has 2 choices
cut map rotation entirely and make each week have a game mode per map
or rotate all maps through all game modes
being unable to play for 20 minutes while you wait to get back to fortunes keep so you can unlock the op weapon of the week sucks in a major way and kills engagement. and then your team has 2 afks and you and you have to bail and reque, or you get unlucky, die 7 minutes in to a 10 minute rotation, then the que wastes the entire rest of the rotation so you have to unque and wait for the rotation to happen again.
WHY
this is so easily avoidable, or just make quests not map specific, its REALLY EASY.

SBMM also sucks, why dont they understand that pert of the reason people like plunder quads and battle royale is that it is super hard to SBMM a full hundred people, you get more variance.

This game is awesome, I have a couple complaints but frankly none of them make me not want to suggest this game especially at its very reasonable price.
I genuinely feel like this game should have been viral like a week ago.
I have seen a couple hit-box complaints but honestly this game has better hit-boxes and snappier combat then basically any other 2d game with 3d art in a similar vein, I know games like this get a bad rap because of bloodstained symphony of the night and others that share a style but this one pulls it off nicely.

My specific gripes,
Those are my only questions, the tutorial for this game was surprisingly good compared to other indies in the ganere, but there are a couple things I would love to see added,
A heavy attack, this would transform into the club attack after mole, but being able to do a slow hit during combat from the beginning would make getting the club less jarring.
easy way to skip day/night (as indicated by my question above, I could just be missing it)
slightly better signposting on certain quests (mr fuzzy was bad, it mentions to go to the park, you get the quest and immediately see a playground, I spent an embarrassing amount of time running back and forth in the playground looking for a plush that was more then half way across the map) or at least the quest log being able to give us the last few lines of dialog would help a lot.

well worth the cost for a few hours of good roguelite fun, if the devs see this review you seriously need to make explosives deal less damage to yourself, particularly at early levels, but other then that pretty great.

second game review,
Feels good, better then current cod zombies for sure, while I have a couple gripes with mechanics I definitely think would be relevant if this title was $60, at $20 this game is well worth the price if you like cod zombies.

The gripes
THE DLC SELECTION OMG
The dlc selection is a problem, I felt the need to tab through every single dlc because the game was more then twice the price with them included, turns out each dlc is just a skin for your character but it feels awful to have the game have a barrier to entry of reading through all those pages, this problem is more on steam then the dev, but if dev could slap a "cosmetic" label on the splash art for the dlc that are cosmetic I think you would get more first time buyers.
I dislike having difficulty selection, I understand it being important for the game to be accessable but the game feels significantly easier then the cod version on almost every setting, I think a few difficulties could be eliminated with just having a difficulty where you press a button to start the next round but maintaining the enemy damage and hp so you can practice the easter eggs.
melee feels weird, quick melee has an odd delay between swings, I understand the balancing effect here but it just feels bad. I would rather have it do less damage and have less delay then the other way around.
I still do not understand how miracles work, particularly the ones that seem like they would be passive, do the new miracles replace the old ones if you dont use them? are they stackable? what actually causes you to gain a miracle point?
I dislike tiered "pack a punch" type mechanics, while it is inoffensive here and allows for weapons to scale to lategame better I would prefer that the tiers be devided into different machines or something else to give more of a feeling of each tier being special besides the first and last tier.
Edit: 5th game, the wonder weapons are a further gripe (I have been grinding the first map, will do other maps once I clear the boss) both the plague and the thunderbolt feel less like "wonderweapons" and more like what cod ww2 special pack a punches were, the same weapon with some additional particle effects and a little bit of AOE, while they are way better then standard weapons numerically (un upgraded they do similar dps to tier 2) I do not think they do enough to feel special compared to standard weapons.
Lastly: honorable soduku. I understand the feeling that you need to balance people extending rounds to do challenges, but honestly, let us just run zombies in circles if we want, dont make them explode for no reason after 5 minutes, its dumb.

BE WEARY! the edition you buy matters a lot!
Zombies Chronicles deluxe is usually the cheapest version with all zombies content!
Avoid zombies Chronicles (normal) edition!
DO NOT BUY THE MTX, infinite gobblegum mods are available free on steam workshop!

Still the best cod zombies, we prey gulf war is good.

TLDR
Buy on sale for zombies, possibly story, pay $20-$30 at most and its honestly a great deal

Long version
So, multiplayer is mostly (entirely) dead, and the loot box shenanigans dont help, dont buy this for multiplayer. Buy it for zombies and the story (story is mediocre but man, is it nostalgic for me who grew up with world at war) the zombies mode gets a lot of complaints from longtime zombies fans but its quite fun, and possibly the last game that really captures the "nazi zombies" experience, everything since has had the "nazi" filed off for corporate reasons, it has a nice dark tone with more grounded fantastical elements that feel like the kind of thing red skull would be studying in a captain america movie. If you want to try to figure out the easter egg yourself rather then going to 8 year old youtube videos this is also pretty much the easiest game to figure out the easter egg for, being that the menu gives you steps for it and there are two "levels" of egg, the "casual" which is pretty simple, there arent any steps where you think to yourself "but what the hell does this have to do with spawning the boss?" everything makes sense. if you chose not to do the thing that ends the game after you beat the casual easter egg you can start in on the "hardcore' easter egg, which includes a lot more elements of what the treyarch eggs have, picking up random garbage and doing things that have nothing to do with anything and secret codes and such.
But really, the only reason I can recommend this game is because of how old it is, it goes on frequent sales and you should never buy it without one, at this point the sale price is just the normal price and the base price really should have been marked down permanently long ago but at least most of the mtx are dead and gone (except the season pass, if you like the base zombies I believe it has more maps, I have not played them) and if you get it for $20-30 for the base game there is far more then $20-30 of good fun to be had.

Edit with double the playtime
Still good, still just doing occasional zombies, beginning to wish I had the season pass after 4 hours of play (♥♥♥♥ games that go "hey this is 8 years old but the game and season pass are still separate, no GOTY edition or anything, screw you") one big negative, difficulty scaling in this particular zombies is way worse then in other zombies, I used to be a player who would chill with a farming weapon/starter weapon for 10/15 rounds just to build points and have fun, you cant really do that here because of the way the zombies health scales as well as the fact that special zombies are tied to both rounds and map completion and it bothers me, I wish more mods existed for this game so that I could tweak this stuff. also the elite enemies start spawning as soon as you get pack a punch, so there's basically never a point like in the treyarch titles where you get to feel op for a few rounds when you first get pap. I speedrun the pap machine and i still feel weak because of scaling and the amount of hp they put on specials.

Final edit:
Uninstalled without booting up since my last review, the fact is that I am still reccomending it, four hours for the $20 i spent and maybe coming back later if i want more of the atmosphere of this zombies, but really the season pass zombies maps should be included in the purchase price at this point as the fact is most of the rest of the game is worth very little. the only reason I am uninstalling is the 100gb install size, I would still stop by for some atmospheric zombies if it didnt take up %10 of my HD