Recent reviews by flesh-eating honey mustard

90% of my in-game deaths are due to artillery.

I wasn't expecting this level of historical accuracy! Recommended.

Online basically never works. Constantly get a "Failed to connect to EA servers: Error code 721" prompt, and when I finally do manage to get online and get into a server, I can maybe play for 5 minutes before randomly getting booted to the main menu with a similar "failed to connect" error.

Not my internet, given I have fast fiber-optic internet with zero issues in literally any other game in my library. EA's just letting the servers for this game rot because they aren't making a mint by strangling people with lootboxes anymore.

TL;DR: Shows promise, but held back by ever-increasing amount of bugs and agonizingly slow development of new features, and has absolutely no roadmap.

UPDATE:
Devs also seem more interested in selling $30 DLCs for their engine, which still after 4+ years in development (20 years, technically, see below) cannot yet make a playable standalone game. Over $1,200 USD of DLCs, while the engine has "Mixed" reviews, a 300+ long bug list, dozens of promised features either broken, incomplete, or outright missing, is a huge glowing red flag about their priorities. My advice? Bite the bullet and learn Unity/Unreal/FLAX/Godot, etc. You can either spend 4 years learning one of those engines and start making something with real potential, or you can sit on your hands for 4 years waiting for MAX to improve, only for them to upload another $25,000 worth of DLCs, break more things, and have the same janky, floaty, early 90's FPS combat that even free Unity templates have completely beat... and then TGC will probably announce "GameGuru Ultra" that promises a dozen more things that they have absolutely no intention of delivering on.

GameGuru MAX is a new game-maker software developed by The Game Creators, known for their previous products, GameGuru (now dubbed "GameGuru Classic") and arguably more successful and well-known "FPS Creator" and "DarkBasic" products.

GameGuru MAX makes a lot of steps in the right direction; bringing back some elements from FPSC that were lost in translation to GameGuru such as allied characters, and even including many new features like an inventory system that carries between levels, a much more intuitive way to customize the various HUD screens/menus throughout, and a visual logic system to quickly string things together. Many new editor features overall make the user experience a lot more fluid and fun, and the new terrain system lets you quickly get a basic landscape to start off with.

It does a lot right, and sounds good, so why the negative review?

Three main things: Bugs, slow development, and very poor optimization.

First, the bugs. Lord, are they numerous. You got everything from minor graphical bugs, such as character's T-Posing for a moment before activating or particles rendering out-of-order to things behind them, to major game-breaking bugs, like entities not getting copied over to a standalone or changes made in the level editor not saving properly. And these bugs are not only numerous, but they seem to take quite a long time to get fixed. And at that, when they finally are reported as "fixed", half of the time a quick test reveals a number of older bugs have reappeared, no doubt due to a lack of regression testing. I know fixing bugs is far easier said than done, but the sheer number of bugs, and the age of some of them, are both definitely worrying.

Second, the slow development. GameGuru MAX was in early-access since March 2022, and was in a limited-access-alpha stage for a year or two before that. Not to mention, GameGuru MAX was built on the foundation of GameGuru Classic, which in turn was built on the foundation of FPSC, giving GameGuru MAX some roots that go back just shy of 2 decades. It is very unfortunate then that we're still dealing with problems that plagued us back in 2005 with FPSC, like standalone builds not copying over all entities/assets properly. Features like improved weather, particle effects for blood/explosions/guns/etc, nevermind major features like multiplayer, are all indefinitely postponed with absolutely no roadmap or clear vision for the future. It makes development feel even slower than it actually is, and it certainly doesn't instill a lot of confidence that MAX will get finished anytime soon.

Finally, the poor optimization. Visually, with the right assets, MAX can look about on-par with a mid-gen Xbox One/PS4 era game. Respectfully impressive, especially for TGC, but definitely not something that should run, frankly, as terribly as it does. An RTX 3050 with 16GB of RAM and a latest-gen Intel i7 shouldn't run an empty outdoors level at a choppy 45-ish FPS with poor frame-pacing. The recommended specs on MAX's steam page are absurdly high, and not realistic to expect an average user to have when distributing a game you've made in MAX. Indoors/small levels can fare a bit better when you drag the camera draw distance slider way down, but there's still inconsistent frame pacing and stutters/micro-freezes even at 60 FPS, and overall it's a bandaid-fix for a serious underlying issue that needs to be addressed at the source. Much attention needs to be placed here eventually to get MAX running much better than it does currently.

Overall, GameGuru MAX is a step in the right direction by TGC, but it carries a lot of problems that plagued it's ancestors. It has the same jankiness, poor performance, and plethora of bugs we've sadly come to expect from TGC. They've made some progress towards a better product, but with the lack of any kind of roadmap we're totally in the dark of when we can actually expect things to wrap up, even if they're inevitably going to be far away. Overall, GameGuru MAX just isn't in any kind of state where I could in good faith recommend it to someone else.

I'll be more than happy to turn this review into a positive one if things improve; there just isn't an alternative to MAX on the market for a game-maker that's both fun/easy and capable. I want this kind of product to exist so badly, but MAX just can't deliver in it's current state.

UPDATE: 5/3/2024------------------------------

Performance has been massively improved, now empty levels can run upwards of 120 FPS on the same system. A populated level can keep a locked 60 with V-Sync on easily. Praise is certainly warranted and granted in this area; it took a while to get here, but a job done well takes time, and all that. However, there are still some stutters/hitching noticeable with certain gameplay events, potentially being the engine loading in an asset(?) but there's no asynchronized asset loading, so the entire engine freezes briefly as the asset is pulled from disk. (I may be wrong, it could be some other issue, like an operation being ran on the CPU that hitches the engine for similar reasons of not being asynchronous; basically meaning the entire engine waits for the process to complete, rather than being able to run it "on the side" outside of the main gameplay loop, if that makes sense.)

The other issues however, still remain. The engine struggles to build a reliable and stable standalone, often consistently crashing when trying to go beyond the first level, missing assets from levels beyond the first, or just plain having desynchronization from editor-to-standalone. (IOW the final game doesn't look or behave identical to how it does when tested in-editor, like the sun's position in the sky not being the same for example.) I also noticed a new bug where explosions don't damage enemies at all.

Development still unfortunately seems to be rather slow; there's still no roadmap, and MAX hasn't really gotten any new "major gameplay features" just yet, i.e. new capabilities usable for a game project, over background inclusions, like the new performance settings. (Such as; particles for explosions/bullet impacts/etc. something that has an immediate and noticeable positive impact on the quality of your game.)

Overall, MAX is improving, but very, very slowly, and very, very subtly. I'm not saying they should rush this, but ideally it may be worth temporarily focusing what manpower they have on areas that are more immediate (new gameplay features that can more directly appeal to users resulting in more sales to bolster development), or biting the bullet and fronting costs to hire more developers to speed up whatever backend development they seem constantly lost within.

I really wish Steam had a "mixed" option, but generally I feel I have more negative things to say than positive, so I'll mark it as such.

The Anacrusis is yet-another co-op horde shooter, as copying Valve's iconic Left-4-Dead seems to be a growing trend all of a sudden. Set in a retro-futuristic 1970's themed spaceship, the crew appears to have been overtaken by facehugger-like alien parasites (or is it a viral/bacterial infection, and their heads are just mutated to look alien? It's not clear, which is a running problem here.) You fight your way through hordes of these afflicted crewmembers with laser-based weaponry, and make your way to safety.

You have your usual tropes you'd expect; 4 "characters" (more on this later), linear maps that end in a saferoom, you have your "special" enemies like a slime-based enemy that can encase survivors in a slime or create puddles that slow you down, a ranged grabber enemy that's sorta like the Smoker from L4D, and naturally the brute-like tank that soaks up damage and is designed to break up the pace and require the team work together to focus fire on it and take it down. There's a few new ideas, such as these "perk" stations that let you upgrade your character (much, much, much better executed than B4B's card system).

Gunplay is "serviceable"; guns feel okay to shoot, but it pales in comparison to L4D2's incredible gore and destruction. Enemies splatter with this glowing orange blood, which does almost feel like a "censored" option, or something like the "cartoon gore" option in Serious Sam games. (This blood also doesn't seem to appear on the enemy's model or on the environment, but I may be misremembering.) Upon death, they don't have the incredible variety of mo-cap death animations that seamlessly blend into a ragdoll that L4D has; they just kinda "flop over dead" into ragdoll instantly which feels a bit silly and lacks impact or weight. Overall it's not exactly a super high-budget game, and it does kinda show in the basic gunplay.

However, the single biggest issue with this game, is unfortunately the lack of immersion or detailing.

The characters are very basic; they seem to just have basic reactions like "Oh look an enemy!" or "Oh look a shop I used to go to!" without any real commentary or personal input. The characters all feel like the same cardboard cutout; compare this to the diverse cast of it's inspiration, L4D. You have Bill, the grisled Vietnam veteran who's living on borrowed time, and serves as an almost jaded father-figure to the group with a heart of gold. Louis, the optimistic office worker who always tries to keep the group in high spirits. Francis, the meatheaded biker who jokingly hates everything and has a weird and entertaining sense of humor. And finally Zoey, the college student who has a bit of a perky attitude and keeps her team in check, mostly. L4D2 goes even further! You have Coach, the wholesome small-town PE coach who has a similar role to Bill but with a lot more optimism and lightheartedness. Ellis, the lovingly immature gun-toting redneck who's always telling tall-tales about his friend we never meet. Nick, the somewhat self-absorbed conman who at first hates his team (particularly Ellis) but over time learns to get along and even enjoy their company. And finally you have Rochelle, who is...uh...well the one "non-character" I think Valve has ever made. She just kinda has very basic reactions to everything, and doesn't really have anything personal or unique to interject ontop of it.

The Anacrusis characters all feel like clones of Rochelle. That's about all you need to know about them tbh.

The environments are visually very interesting in terms of artstyle, but there doesn't seem to be nearly as much character as the ironically more mundane settings of it's inspiration. It's kinda just a ship, with maybe a few cool ideas (such as that large garden-like atrium full of fake plants with a massive screen overhead simulating a fake sky, with some damaged/glitching panels exposing the illusion) but overall it's mostly just "hallways and rooms". L4D did a lot with selling the feeling of a viral/bacterial outbreak, and how survivors and the military response might've played out, with plenty of environmental storytelling, bodybags and quarantine posters all around, and all sorts of small details that help the world feel varied and lived-in. In the Anacrusis; for example, weapons just kinda appear in this kind of weird "default pose" in the middle of a hallway or room without much rhyme or reason. (Even just putting a body, a trail of blood, some dead aliens nearby, and positioning the gun to look like it fell out of their arms as they died would go miles to improve this.) You don't really feel like an outbreak happened here beyond the random bits of damage to the ship (why is this room utterly destroyed? what happened here? No explanation seems to be implied or given; it just is. Meanwhile in L4D campaigns, you'd have at least some dead bodies or items nearby to imply that maybe survivors tried blowing their way through a wall in a tough spot but it backfired, if not directly seeing the cause yourself, such as the insanely memorable plane crash sequence in the Dead Air campaign.)

And finally, the little details. The soundtrack and sound design, is, forgettable honestly. L4D had amazing tracks that sold the tension and atmosphere, and tons of little music cues for when ambient zombies were still around, when the player was at high stress, low stress, when special zombies spawned or were attacking you, etc. The guns firing, the various special zombie screams, the sound of a crying witch somewhere in the area, it all came together and made an unforgettable sound experience. The Anacrusis has a selection of combat tracks that play during specific events in a campaign, and that seems to be just about it. And of those very few tracks, they're all so honestly generic and forgettable I'm struggling to remember a time I was fighting back zombies and just having a blast with the music, like I would have all the time in L4D.

Overall, as another negative review puts it, "The Anacrusis is L4D but without the stuff that made L4D memorable."

Going from L4D to The Anacrusis, it's like getting a delicious steak at a restaurant. You want to have it again at home, so you buy the same exact cut of steak at the store. You expect it to have the same flavor and taste because hey it's the same cut; it has all the core features of that delicious steak, right? But with that first bite, you're saddened to find out it misses the magic; it wasn't cooked the same way, it didn't have the same seasonings and care for small details, and you're eating it in your studio apartment instead of the carefully crafted fine-dining atmosphere of the restaurant you were just at. It ticks all the big boxes, but brushes aside all the little ones that make an otherwise "average" game great.

It's really, really rough around the edges, but there's still a good strong backbone there. They just need to build the rest of the animal around it.

While Prodeus is certainly a great game overall, there's a huge, glaring flaw the devs will seemingly never acknowledge, let alone address; Nexus points. If you die, you respawn with full health at a "Nexus point", but with ZERO setback. Any enemies you've killed stay dead, any keys/items you found remain in your inventory, and any progress you made is kept. This essentially gives the player godmode, and makes the health and armor system pointless, because a player can die an endless number of times with no functional gameplay penalty. This means you can just mindlessly throw yourself at enemies over and over with no strategy and still succeed just because their attacks are meaningless when you'll just revive with no loss of progress whatsoever. (Sure you won't get the "highest score possible", but 99% of players don't care about minmaxing a meaningless number they see once at the end of a level and never care about again, they want death to matter more directly in the gameplay itself.)

I'd much rather take a standard "checkpoint" system where it autosaves your progress at a nexus point, and just reloads that save with whatever health/ammo/items/progress you had at that point, or a "lives" system where you get 3 free nexus point respawns, but if you die after running out you have to restart the level, or even a basic "lose your weapons and ammo where you died and have to go pick them back up". At the moment I'd take literally anything over the godmode system we currently have.

It takes all of the challenge and thus fun out of the game for me, having basically a cheat turned on that cannot be turned off. As a Kickstarter backer I'm disappointed and frustrated they seemingly ignore any and all complaints about the Nexus system, so I cannot in good faith recommend this game.

The only reason to get Halo infinite. The MP is grindy, buggy, and has no content. Campaign is pretty awesome but the fact that 2/3rds of the game was cut out is really felt with the empty open world, especially after you beat the story and clear the outposts. Please, please, please add the option to replay any campaign mission at any time, so I don't have to start a new game and play through like 3-4 hours of gameplay to just replay a specific fight once!

A live service game without the service. 343i had lightning in a bottle with the biggest Halo launch to date, but they completely squandered it, being the grossly incompetent joke of a company they are. Hardly any content, overpriced and greedy "micro"transactions, very poor progression/customization that ties far too heavily into previously mentioned greedy overpriced "micro"transactions, serious desync/hitreg bugs and issues, and cheaters galore.

I'd say give this game several months for updates, but with the current molasses drip rate updates are dropping at, I think we'd be lucky to get a new map after several years...

All the battles are the same basic thing. You make two big crowds of two different enemy types, they beeline directly towards the other with zero tactic or strategy, and then they just stand infront of each other and do melee/ranged damage until the enemy is all dead. I was hoping that this battle simulator would have more of actual battles, even basic stuff like enemies with guns realizing it would be better to back up away from zombies and shoot from a distance. Instead every unit is just a basic reskin of the same thing; run up to enemy, attack until no more enemy. It gets very monotonous and boring after 10 minutes because the AI don't do anything interesting or unexpected that would make a battle interesting to watch. It's a shame the developers sacrificed having anything unique or fun about the AI just so they could plaster a bajllion of them on screen. It's impressive like, the first time you see it and ONLY the first time. Once you realize how braindead stupid they are and how repetitive every battle it is, the charm quickly wears off.

In short, if you want to watch or even partake in fun, interesting AI battles, just get GMod. Not only does GMod have much smarter AI that performs more interesting tactics that make it actually entertaining to watch, but you have a much, much greater selection of NPC mods to choose from. Sure you won't get 10 bajillion NPCs on screen, but it doesn't matter how many/little NPCs are on screen when they're boring braindead idiots that aren't at all interesting to watch fight.

Generic "hollywood" sci-fi artstyle, equally generic and forgettable music, annoyingly abundant QTE events (I hope you enjoy that 3 second animation of pressing a button because man is it frequent), laughably poor writing (especially characters, good lord that captain exists just to say "no" to chief lol), and easily the worst faction/enemies the franchise has seen to date, probably even one of the worst enemies I've seen in an FPS in general for years; the Prometheans. They're spongey, have the ability to regenerate their shields incredibly quickly, the ability to literally TELEPORT at will into thin air whenever they feel even slightly threatened (trust me they do this ALOT.), they can do this stupid teleport melee attack that instakills you and is nigh-undodgeable, they can come back from the dead (watchers can revive fallen knights that took you so much effort to put down if you don't notice the flying bastards had spawned) and the second half of the game is basically just these broken enemies and their weapons, which are defectively weak when used against them. It's like, someone took the worst aspects of every annoying enemy type across all halo games; the annoying reviving mechanic from the Flood, the annoying bullet-sponginess of the Halo 2 brutes, the twitchy, undodgeable and overpowered melee of the Reach elites, and then decided "eh why not make em teleport too for good measure, lmao". You can safely avoid this one, even if you got a steal on the entire collection.

Oh yeah, and the multiplayer is just a diet-cola call of duty. Nothing about this is "halo".

It's Halo, it literally invented modern console FPS games as we know them.

Oh you can probably skip the 4th one, though.