Recent reviews by Zero95lucky

Any card battler where you can go from 20 health to -3 on the 5th turn do to a quirk of the rules is not worth your time.

Is Fun.
A chaotic 2D multiplayer battler. A unique movement mechanic centered around jumping & webbing to avoid precarious falls. Fight versus up to 3 other players with the simple objective of being the last spider standing a set # of times in a row. Death is instant & battles are quick. For single-players there's a wave survival mode that pits you against a variety of Ai enemies. This can be played cooperatively online.

The weapon selection is a tiny bit limited. For ~20 of 'em, you have like 4 different types a swords, a gun that shoots swords; a plasma-gun, a mirrored plasma-gun; a slew of different grenades. Still, you have a fair amount of variety, & a sorta spider-force that let's you pull a thrown weapon back towards you.
Controls & nuance of movement will take some getting used to. You'll probably slingshot yourself into a kill-zone more than once.
A last little concern. Sometimes you get some sorta server lag. You lose control, or the game stutters for a moment, & the spiders slide all over the place, usually into death. Could be my internet, could be hackers, could be a bug that the dev.s 'ill address. Whatever the case it hasn't completely ruined my experience. Just a couple games.


For my $20 & 3 hr.s, I've already got alot of fun out of SpiderHeck. I just hope they get enough players in the coming weeks & the servers don't die.

Squad is a great game. One of the most unique & fun multiplayer games I've played.
However in January, shortly after receiving majority invest by Tencent, the publisher announced they were going to add micro-transactions & they have. In addition They've expressed interest in charging for future updates in the form of Dlc. This is in contradiction with their foundational promise not to add Dlc, something the company said at the time they were aware of, but just don't care about.
I don't like the direction the game has taken & will continue to take under the leadership of mobile game developer Vlad Cerald. MicroTransactions have no place in a MilSim. This isn't a freenium Iphone game. It's a multiplayer simulator I paid $43.97 for.

Even putting aside corporate ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, the game is broken. Everytime you hop in a vehicle it stutters like a motherf*ck & you get major input delay, 'cause of something they added in an update & never fixed. Idk, it wasn't like this before 2023.
& instead putting resources into fixing & optimizing it, they're being put into developing godd@mn emoticons noone needs.

Then there's the rumors that have surfaced since the reorganization of sketchy ♥♥♥♥ the company's been doing. Like banning playing who talk bad about China/Russia & installing bitcoin miners with the game. No substantiating these but I wouldn't put past this ethically bankrupt developer.

♥♥♥♥ you Offworld. I will not be playing your game or any other game you release in the future & will encourage others to avoid you like the plague.

It's fine, I'd honestly give it a neutral if I could.
When securing victory, strategy is as much as a factor as luck & if your opponent has better cards than you.

To get better cards for your deck you have buy card packs which can be purchased either, with in-game coins you grind for, or with real-life currency.
i.e. the game is Pay-to-Win. In addition to the the dlc listed on the steam page, there is an in-game store where you can spend hundreds of dollars on on dozens of packs. (they're ~$9 a pack, becoming more efficient if you buy multiple.)

It's essentially a lootbox. See, cards are grouped into 4 rarities. You open a pack, you get 5 cards you don't yet have* of random rarity, usually common. I think they do that thing where at least one will be at least level 2.
Beyond paying for more powerful cards you can also pay for; single player mode.

Yes, they have a variety of "campaigns" where you pit your decks against an Ai in a series of battles with modified rules, & none of them come with the base game. I think you can demo the first level of one of em.
You can also buy cosmetics. Little knick-knacks that sit on the edge of the board during games & unique cardbacks.


Now I could go on for a few paragraphs about the actual game-play, but it's really not worth it.
As I said, it's one part Strategy, one part luck & the amount of money you've spent.

In short you deploy units who have attack & health and try to bring the opponents life to 0. You've also got "orders" which are spells and "counter-measures" which are traps. Every card cost an amount in kredits to play, and you get another kredit to play around with at the start of each turn. Lastly there's a shared front line one player occupies at a time, and units will have different ranges they can attack at.

One thing I will get into is initial setup. Each player draws a hand and may mulligan any number of cards from it. One player has to go first, and to compensate their opponent gets an extra card in their initial draw. Players draw a card at the start of each turn. So during their first turn, player two has 6 cards to choose from, while player one only has 4.

There is some debate as to whether this is significant. The dev.s say it's for balancing & that going first is so advantageous the game wouldn't be fair otherwise. In my experience going first puts you at a significant disadvantage.
Often a game will come down to if you are able to react to & counter whatever your opponents is doing. & whether or not you're even able to do that is dependent on the cards in hand & if you can afford them.
You may mulligan & end up with 4 4-7cost cards you can't use for another 3+ turns, by which time your opponent could have you in an untenable position. This is an extreme example but similar situations are prevalent.
If all the cards in your hand are too expensive to play you have to skip, wasting not only a turn but also those credits you couldn't spend.

A player with more options in the first place, can better react to any situation, and thus has inherent advantage.
& the player going first always has fewer options. This isn't to say you'll always lose if you go first. Just that you're more likely lose if you go first.


On the community, it's pretty sh*t. The number players who are polite are outnumbered by the immature & @$$holes. The type of people who spam "Your go" comments while you're taking your turn. This is one of those games where you can't talk to your opponent directly. You have a number of predesigned messages called "emotes" that you set before battle on a per nation basis. You have three per type & more rare ones can be bought**. Luckily there's a mute button.

I think that's all I care to say about this game.
If you can ignore the slimy business practices you might get a few hours of fun out of it before the meta gives you an aneurysm. I've played off and on since full release. I'll play for abit before getting fed up and leaving for extended periods of time. Then come back to see if it's improved, get angry & repeat. There's some fun to be had if you're good at wading through bullsh*t.

If you do want to give it a try start playing now. They're giving away a $10 card pack for free during it's introductionary period. They don't say when it will end though, so you know what they say about striking iron.

Was a great game. Paradox killed it.

Even ignoring the questionable DLC policy and the influx of pointless Features that just add clutter. The Game is buggy and unstable. Mismanaged Quality Assurance all but guarantees new bugs introduced with every update. And in accordance with Paradox's business model, the game is always being updated, with priority given to selling DLC over resolving developing issues. Thus ensuring a near constant broken state.

Now add an unneeded launcher that is debatably spyware and general sketchiness from the company(seeing alot one sentence positive reviews on their products). You know the kind of stuff that's hard to prove but still disconcerting in light of other factors.

Update: Paradox has enabled the ability to rollback to the original version through the steam beta system. This has addressed my primary grievance. As I cannot attest to the current state of the paradox version, my original review shall remain, but should be read as neutral. I'm sure the sketchy launcher's still there, but playing with the anniversary patch doesn't run it. For all I know Paradox has shifted focus in the last year and their QA is now on par.
Prison Architect is a wonderful management game, worth playing as Introversion intended. If you don't mind supporting Paradox, pick it up for the sake of getting access to anniversary.

A satire of open world games made by someone who doesn't like open world games. Funny until you get the joke, which is almost immediately, because that's all it has to offer. It tries to say OWGs are pointless and boring by purposefully omitting the elements that make those games fun.

“Gameplay” consists of moving to a map icon and pressing 4 buttons, to unlock a journal entry. Beyond that you can fish. A sort minigame, at certain icons, that also rewards an entry.
There's a story, of sorts, I think. It's presented in Giant blocks of text I didn't bother reading because I didn't anticipate it being worth my time.

Like most OWGs this has an exp level up system. However it's invalidated by its own redundancy. There are 3 “skill trees” comprised of useless skills. Not skills that seem worthless 'cause they're poorly integrated with other systems. Skills that do literally nothing, because that's the point. The “joke”.

This developer doesn't seem to understand that loading screens have a purpose. It opens with a faux loading screen that presents 3 obvious tips before saying, “This isn't really a loading screen. But it wouldn't be an open world game without waiting.”
Yeah it's easy to say loading should only last a few seconds when all you have to compute is a 2D image for your game world and a bunch of sprites. As oppose to the hundreds of Assets present in any given area of an OWG.

You'll want to avoid this one. Yeah it's free, and yeah it only takes an hour or two to complete. But there are a helluva lot more productive and fun things you could do with those hours, and you should value your time.

Open World Game: the Open World Game is a joke. One I didn't find very funny.

Fair bias up front. I bought this game because it looked like a potential replacement for my beloved Gear Head Garage, which can't be run anymore. I'll try to avoid comparing them. I knew this game wasn't going to be a copy of GHG, and it seemed to be focused on the racing side of things. However the sales pitch gave the impression that I'd be able to play as a mechanic, earning money by flipping cars, safely ignoring the racing side if I chose.
First off breakable tutorials are a pet-peeve of mine. If you can by mistake put a tutorial in a state where you can't progress without exiting, it speaks to the low quality of the game. Tutorials are given through pop-up speech bubbles that you click away. Standard fair, but there's no way to bring them back if, like me, you mistakenly dismissed one. There is a vague checklist of stuff you need to do. But how you actually do it can't be restated. Tried buying a part, wasn't what the game wanted, bought another. A popup bubble kept saying, “can't find it buy another newpaper” so I did that. I eventually ran out of money and couldn't keep going.
This is a tutorial.
It shouldn't be: “You ran out of money so now you have to exit the game, delete your profile, and start over.”
It should be: “You ran out of money. But this is a tutorial so we'll undo that mistake and go back a step.”
Naturally I decide to skip the tutorial, which brings us to driving. Cause skipping the tutorial doesn't actually skip the tutorial, it brings you to the second part of the tutorial. Call it an introductory job. Your boss(cause you're not a garage owner, your a garage worker) wants you to fix up his junker and do 3 laps in it. You get another checklist of parts to replace. In addition you gotta refill water, oil, and some other things. I eventually figured it out. Get the right parts in, settings engaged, out to the track. The game doesn't tell you how to drive. Or maybe it does in the tutorial I skipped. I press W and my car creeps along. I figure out it wants me to shift(Shift Key). My car is still crawling, so on a hunch I hit up arrow and lurch forward. The game controls with Arrows instead of WASD, cause apparently we're going back to 2003. IDK if you can rebind keys. Didn't check, didn't care. Game wants you to do 3 laps and one of them has to be completed in under half a minute. And I just couldn't do it. I did it in 30s, I even got down to 29s. But 27s was a bridge too far. This is the first part, of the first mission, in the racing career path. I ended the job which the game let's you do without hassle.
Presumably you're being set loose at this point. Free to play how you see fit. So lets talk about gameplay. Most of your interactions are done through 2 menu bars. One that runs the length of the bottom of the screen, and another smaller one in the top left corner. Taking apart cars in this game is... hollow. Fist off to do any work on a car you have put it on the jack. This involves hitting a button and sitting through a short animation. Something that's kinda endearing the first time, but I can see becoming real annoying real fast. Selecting a part brings up a clipboard with information about the part, it current status, a list of parts attached to it, and the option to fix or remove it. You don't have to remove an item to fix it. You just press a button and *poof* it's magically fixed. Hitting remove places the part in your inventory. None of the parts have any dependency with each other. You can take the engine block out without removing any of the parts attached to it. They just float there. Okay..
You don't just take items from your inventory and add them to the car. You have to select a part already present on the car, select the line on the clipboard that says; [Slot Name]<Empty>, then select the part you want to add. If the base part is absent you select a glowing red anchor point instead. This is why the mechanic side of the game is so underwhelming. You're not building a car, you're skimming checklists. You never “take a car apart”. You cherry pick what items need replacing, and fix them through magic.
Everything bought in this game is purchased from newspaper ads. You don't get a complete selection of parts for whatever car your building, just whatever's currently advertised. If the part you want is absent you can “buy another newspaper”. However this action's on a timer. So if the part I need to finish a job isn't there and doesn't appear with a new paper, I guess I just sit there twiddling my thumbs for the next 2 minutes. Why? This is so unbelievably Dumb.
You can accept jobs fixing something that's gone wrong with a random car. This is accomplished by talking to your uncle(boss) and selecting an option in a submenu. This is contextualized by your boss getting a job from a customer that he delegates to you. It spawns a random car, with a random dysfunction, in the garage. Remember that checklist I mentioned earlier. During the intro jobs it was accessed by a button on the upper menu bar. I thought this was a good feature. While doing a job I'd get a checklist of parts that needed to be taken care of. However when you accept a job the top bar is replaced with a speech bubble of the customer giving you a hint as to what's wrong. Something along the lines of “I saw smoke coming from the hood.” It's up to you to figure out what's broken. How do you do this? Well you could tediously select every item group in the front end hoping to find what's broken. Or ask uncle for a hint by clicking the giant question mark. He will then yell at you what needs fixing. This is often just as vague. For our example it was “Fix that cooling system!” Okay, where's the cooling system? It turns out the cooling system isn't 1 part. It's at least 4 spread across 2 different groups. The thermostat & water pump attached to the engine, and the cooling fan attached to the radiator. I get these fixed mission's still not done. What do I do now? Everything looks fine. I eventually figure out I have to click on my uncle, who's model is standing in the doorway. If you say your finished and everything fixed, the job completes. If something's still broken he yells at you to finish the job. There's no master list of parts in the car, that I could find. You have to select parts to see whether or not they're broken and not all parts list what they're attached too. So good luck finding the needle in that haystack.
So that's the basic gameplay loop. Accept a job. Ask uncle what's wrong. Look through half a dozen menus, clicking parts to magically fix them as you find them. When you get enough money You can buy your own car, and do it all over for your own benefit. I could talk about more. There's other buttons on that menu. One brings you to a track. Another a parking lot in 3rd person. The game takes place in Australia and Really wants you to know it. Between the music, the postcard you're given, to the obnoxious way everyone sounds. It's like a foreigner wanted their game set in Australia and wrote how they thought they talked. I have no way of knowing. Maybe Aussies really talk like this and the writing's just awkward.
In conclusion, I don't think this is a terrible, horrible, game. It's just a bad game for me. And I admitted my bias up front. I'm spoiled by a much better game from my childhood. It's focus is racing which I wasn't interested in. It could be argued it's my fault for skipping most of the tutorial. But if a tutorial enters a broken state and I decide not to waste anymore time on it. That's on the developer. Gameplay is over-simplified to the point of being completely unengaging. The game is vague when it needs to be strait up, and acts like a simulator only at the wrong times. I can't describe how cheep everything feels. The buttons look off, fonts look ugly. It feels like a tycoon game from 2 decades ago.
I gave this one a hard pass. And if your interests align with mine you probably will too.

Would not recommend on Steam unless you have a really good computer.
Running at low-med graphics and the game works great... for about 15 minutes. After which it invariably crashes; for no discernible reason. Worse Steam doesn't recognize that it's crashed and continues to run some sort of background process. There's no way to force close it as it's not in the task list, and exiting steam completely just leads to an infinite "waiting for Fallout" message. So you'll have to restart your computer to get it to stop. Not doing this has just lead to my computer freezing & crashing within an hour from whatever the game's still trying to do in the background. I'm not the only one to experience these issues.

In sort the game is majorly messing with my system and I don't appreciate it.

What little of the game I've been able to play in the 2 hours Steam says I have has been enjoyable. Seems like a mix of 3 & Vegas with some new innovations. Hacking and picking's the same. Looting no longer pauses just opens a side menu A'la Bioshock. They added sprinting so sneaking feels weird with a controller.

An exploratory adventure game that evokes horror themes. It's mostly above cheep jumpscares relying on tension and atmosphere. Incredibly well paced, once you start to think there can't be more to painting a map of the environment, you're given a some new tool or ability to experiment with. The story concerns the history of an ancient cavern complex and the dark secrets it holds within. Visually striking Scanner Sombre manages to paint a beautiful setting with it's simple but unique artstyle.

A horrid voice actress tells you to pick 1 of 5 points to walk to. You spend 10 minutes slowly walking toward said point to discover..
Literally Nothing.
So you pick another point and spend 3 minutes walking towards that before you hit an invisible wall.
That's pretty much all I got out of this.
The glare on every surface blinds you so badly you have to look at the sky to see the UI, and they have the gall to give you some rougelike esque warning about there being some unforgiving difficulty. Despite what your HuD says at literally every moment there is no danger present. You just walk unobstructed to nothing.

There is no game here and no story to experience.