Recent reviews by Meaty Jackson

Executive Assault 2 has been steadily in development for years now, and despite the excitement I once held for this game and the time spent awaiting its progress, I feel that it's still far off on its trajectory. For a one man project, this game has scaled immensely and WAS worth the love and respect its gathered over the years. It won't be for everyone, though it fills a very interesting genre gap by merging RTS and FPS. With all this said, the game can be wildly confusing. It's really not clear how to do any one thing - even with the in game UI - and the ground combat feels simple and rather clunky. The AI feels incredibly dumb. I definitely have mixed feelings about this game. The concept is great, but I think it's just too grand of a scale for such a small team to execute in ways which make it enjoyable to play.

Witcher 2 is the once promising and adventurous RPG that took all the best parts of the 2010 era's story telling and gameplay, juiced it up by about five times the difficulty, and then added a glossy and engaging story to make progress doubly interesting. It's an adult game. Not in the boobies and sex scenes kind of way, although it has that too. It's grim, dark, comical, and brutal in all the ways you'd expect of Game of Thrones, though with gameplay to match said gore, guts, and glory. With this said, this game can be tough to get into. It has a lot of the older RPG genre's problems, such as directives being all over the place, bugs, game crashes left and right forcing saves every few minutes, choppiness, sometimes obscure mechanics which require failure to understand, timings not being obvious for pass/fail of missions, clunky UIs, and so forth. If you'd played one of the older Bioware games, then you'd know what I'm referring to here. This comment is more so a testament to how much these types of game have evolved over the years. It's miles better than the first Witcher game and I think a charming entry in the trilogy all things considered. The game doesn't feed you directions as if you are a toddler, and rewards those who understand who are doing what, when, why, and how at just about every turn in an intelligent and respectful way to the player. Definitely check it out if you want a mature game to get lost in; only if you have the patience to deal with some of these dated problems. I'd highly recommend checking out NexusMods to download some needed QOL improvements, as there is some much needed padding to improve the general progression, balance, and flow of things.

I've been following Age of Darkness for quite a while now; waiting to play it out until it was more polished and included more features. On the surface, this game is a kindred spirit to your warcraft/starcraft mods where you're tasked with surviving and clearing the map with scaling difficulty. Sprinkle in They Were Billions' horde mechanics, and you have this weirdly shaped game. There are currently three "factions" with varying play styles, each highlighting two differing heroes to play as. The ideas, graphics, and gameplay loops are quite addicting and show immense potential. However, even after having watched this game evolve over roughly 3 years, there are still some glaring issues that need addressing. This game requires - as expected - quite a bit of micro management and calculated expansion. However, the mechanics and pathfinding don't lend to this experience very well. Units will easily body block and clog tight junctions, which makes avoiding AOE attacks a bit frivolous unless you focus on range. Units are also incredibly slow, with negligible upgrades to improve this for the most part. There is no Calvary option, so quickly shifting from one end of the base to the other can be useless unless you know in advance the path the horde is going to take (which to my experience was difficult to predict even with watchtowers). Throwing in the randomness of each survival seed, with no current option to play hand crafted maps, and you can find varying difficulty with resource allocation.

Some of these points are rather nitpicky, however I list them as it leaves me curious as to what PlaySide Studios will focus on with the upcoming updates; given that the roadmap is a bit ambiguous. Multiplayer - especially up to 4-8 teams - would make this an insane experience to share with others and is a much requested feature. With this said, the base material is just too shallow to really make such an increase in scale functional. There aren't ways to customize your heroes, there aren't ways to customize units, most defenses have vertical improvements rather than gameplay altering opportunities, and there are only a handful of ways to build (successfully) tall rather than wide cities. I may be wrong on some of these assumptions, however this game didn't hook me in a way which made me want to investigate further which I find to be a true shame.

I tentatively recommend this title, as there aren't many RTS games like this out there anymore and this game has improved (depending on who you ask) over the years. It needs quite a bit more content to make the replayability a surefire option: whether it be different objective options sprinkled into survival which allow for differing endings (such as a big boss fight), deeper hero mechanics, other bases available to siege in between hordes, or just general combat improvements (such as transport units, flying units, Calvary, armories, or advancements which force the player to commit their upgrades to one such playstyle). There are smaller versions of these ideas included. Excluding the somewhat boring campaign which reminded me of a scaled down SpellForce 3, I do hope that this game expands appropriately.

This game taught me that violence kills.

This is an odd game to judge. It's absolutely addicting, though for all the wrong reasons. There is interesting progression, though with a total lack of precedence or substantial automation. There is both base building and top down rogue-like gameplay. However, both become rather shallow once you're a few hours in. There's just far too much babysitting and needless padding for me to really sit down and genuinely enjoy this game. There isn't a way to absorb all of the surrounding essence, and the cap for devotion is far too low on the main totem. You have to manually instruct your followers to do the most obvious of things, such as laying in bed to fight off a sickness. And these things constantly progress while you're in the dungeon. There are good ideas surrounding this, but the time element here just feels off. Famine events are unique and a step in the right direction for this type of risk/reward to adventuring. However, I feel that you have to hand hold far too much for these events to feel worth while. Combined with the generic stupidity of the NPCs, it can be difficult to spend more time out and about completing the actual quests rather than tending to gardens, cooking meals, and doctoring the ill.

This is hopefully another Devolver title that improves substantially with time. Enter The Gungeon wasn't released in any form near the masterpiece it became after a few years of patches and content additions. There is a listed roadmap for this game in progress, and I think the "sex" update that is to be released soon addresses some of these concerns. Time will tell.

With this said, I can't tell if this game was intended to be speedran - quickly slaying through all 4-5 of the dungeons - just to finish the game, resetting with new doctrine decisions or if it was intended to be this long grind to build up an ensemble of a cult like following. It supports both options, but in all honesty this game is probably best enjoyed plowing through the main content rather than scaling up your base for improved weaponry, relics, and curses. It's essentially a casual and cute game that's pretty to look at, but shallow on deeper consumption. The progression ends far too soon, and exists more as horizontal damage progression rather than providing enough new and unique ways to enjoy and play the game. It's enjoyable and fun initially, however I wouldn't recommend this game in it's current form for those who are more interested in the traditional difficult/rewarding rogue-like game format (ala Hades, Gungeon, Issac, Nuclear Throne, etc) which stand to still be enjoyable 200-300 hours in.

A decent entry in the We Were Here Franchise, especially for its low price. There are three puzzles total, with significantly differing levels of difficulty if you're going for a perfect run. Puzzles 1 and 3 were fantastic, with 3 being the most interesting and fun/entertaining to complete. However, the second puzzle is an absolute nightmare if you aim for a gold ticket as it's entirely reliant on good RNG - in a puzzle with 4 varying elements, half of which must be explained to the other. It's not a bad puzzle in theory, just very unfair with the rolls as it really does come down to the last two random elements you get. You get one "bad" hand of which you can discard, but even that's not enough.

It's odd because in reality you could probably speedrun this game in less than an hour with good communications and very good luck if you don't care for optimal or seamless objectives. Therefore the game somewhat expects you to go for gold, and unnecessarily gate-keeps your progress with the second puzzle. I'd recommend the other ones in the series over this one personally.

Giving this game an honest review would be a disservice.

Do yourself a favor and buy this game for you and a few of your friends; there are singles, doubles, and trio lobbies, so play-styles are more varied. It's easily worth the money, especially when on sale, and it's a very unique twist on Spy vs Spy. The biggest drawback to this game - and the main complaint you'll see from these reviews - is that the community is incredibly small. Therefore you'll go against die-hard fans of the game from time to time, which makes learning sometimes difficult. That isn't to say you can't ball out and have a great game. However, this is an online PvP game at its core so there are matchmaking issues inherit to this problem. The devs are still pushing out updates to this game, including new characters and maps. I could see this game easily getting a massive re-spark in the future if the right streamers or events were hosted around it, and it definitely deserves it.

I can play Reinhardt without having to download Overwatch.

To say that this game needs work is a bit of an understatement. It has all of the elements of what can and should be a great Postal game, though with all of the unwanted jank and buggyness ripe in every mission and at every location. It has improved over time, which gives me hope for this game. They ultimately scaled up Postal 2, without filling in any of the much needed gaps to make exploration and story interesting or entertaining. There fortunately are a lot of satisfying weapons and gimmicks. Coupled with the goofy AI, and undercooked interactions however, they do ultimately fall flat. There's finally some weapon/item progression of sorts with the collectibles and money made, though it feels underdeveloped and non-obvious. Some buildings hide hilarious and unique Easter eggs. Other buildings are just flat out empty and missing assets, and this doesn't even include the literal holes throughout the map. It's obvious that this game wasn't released in equal parts, and it's truly disappointing; even for a game that flaunts being a sequel to "The Worst Game Ever". It's a shame because there are some fun ideas clearly scattered across this game, and it's obvious that this game is a crime of passion.

Ultimately, this long awaited sequel ripe with all of the humor and gameplay you'd expect is instead left void of direction and content. I ran around the various areas hoping to find something crazy to mess with. Instead, it's usually the same ole same ole song and dance.

They should take the team that produced Postal: Brain Damaged, and have them optimize and improve the current levels, weapons, and mobility throughout the game. I do believe Postal 4 is well on its way to being made supreme, though they should double down on fixing and adding to the environments, NPC interactions, and assets they already have. Here's hoping they reach their true potential.