11/12/2023 EDIT: Apparently back in September they added one new free map, which is great! And then replied to their own post complaining about how it's a missed sales opportunity! ??? dropping half a star.


Sold over 100k in barely a month on aesthetics alone, now struggles to break 300 concurrent players in a 24hr peak. You wouldn't think this is an issue, but I promise you it is, because most of these people are playing private lobby and the few who venture out into randoms will soon be blasted by the remaining 10% of the playerbase that has already grinded out the card/character unlocks and leveled up their decks. Median playtime: 8hrs. Median playtime among my Steam friends that own it: 2-2.5hrs, excluding the half who still haven't launched the game. What's with that, huh?

Did you know the game only has like 2 songs when you're not standing by the jukebox? Most of my friends have already muted the in-game music because they play this one song on loop whenever you're not in-game; thankfully when you're in-match the music stops. Uh, it just stops. There is no music at all in-match. What's really bizarre to me given that they tweet out other artists' songs overlapped with the game but afaik they literally only play if you go to the jukebox. Please correct me if I'm wrong about this. EDIT: OST has 6 songs, no idea what the other 4 would even be unless they're tucked in the jukebox.

Held back by a lot of really basic things, ordered by most important imo:
- Card unlocks are all generally more powerful than the base kit.
- Repeat card drops are fed to existing cards to level them up.
- Only 1v1 or 2v2 modes, no FFA and nothing higher even though maps can support it easily.
- Tiny map pool. The demo in February had 2 maps, the game launched with 4; none on the roadmap unless some offhand tweet mentioned it that I can't find.
- Can't rotate teams in private lobby without recreating lobby every time.
- Default/extremely basic Unity movement, no sense of weight or momentum which makes tracking anyone feel awful. (Feels extremely similar to Gunfire Reborn in this regard)
- Other characters need to be grinded out to even play as, really frustrating vibing with a design and being met with "erm, grind pls?" like uhhh okay then.
- Most of the guns feel bad imo, I feel like I'm actively downgrading myself when I swap to anything other than the default pistol besides the sniper (which might be a good thing given the card situation tbh)

Of all of the things to "go back to form" on with your FPS, including a gameplay-affecting battlepass/XP grind is not one of them. This was always one of the worst parts of playing CoD post-3 or any of the clones, like oh yeah sure just give the already experienced player mindless proximity mines and an auto shotty while the n00b gets a sawed-off. Lmfao get real.

The B-line to selling an expansion pass instead of reconsidering the unlocks at all or adding any new maps or modes is extremely disheartening, but it makes that "crazy good" 2/3 launch sale make a little more sense now I guess! Maybe I'm reading into that one too much but then there's this tweet which is uhhh??

I don't know, in a word I'd say "vapid" but that feels overly mean, but it's all I can really think of. Would love to see this get more gamemodes (FFA, KOTH, CTF) and a much higher player cap and absolutely desperately needs more maps. As it stands now? I don't know how you're supposed to get much out of this unless you love spinning a roulette endlessly while vaguely pointing in someone's direction.

now here's a fun and very affordable little online fps game, exactly when i needed such a thing in my life (summer break). this one strongly reminds me of rounds from a few years back and i enjoyed both for similar reasons - they're very low commitment, easy to understand, and come with good mechanics for their power-ups. here, you're dropped into a map with a handful of cards which offer various buffs, debuffs, and tools which you can leverage for an advantage in brief 1v1 or 2v2 skirmishes. as you progress and level up (which admittedly is slow thus far), you collect new cards and begin to understand what types of movement, area control, and characters you prefer and what specific strategies you find effective while building your deck. power-ups include stuff like inflating your enemies head, bullet time, generally pretty typical but effectively used stuff. most successful online shooters like this have somewhat similar setups - tf2 lets you learn different heroes and item loadouts, overwatch does something similar too, they're all hero based i guess - but putting it together with the deckbuilding now common in a lot of indie games was a pretty novel move (aside from neon white lol) and fun to play. it's worth mentioning that the game's a bit janky thus far and lacking in some very basic features (round timers, more modes than just death match) but it just came out so give em some time and see where it goes. definitely recommended if you have friends on discord that you like chilling with

It looks nice! It sounds nice! I liked the crossdressing bit! But...

Among my friends I have been known for years as the resident BOTW hater. I liked the game and completed it, but I've always had a ton of problems with it and have always been baffled by the uncritical praise it gets. Now that Tears of the Kingdom is out it's funny to see people go "oh wow this is so much better than BOTW!!" Yeah? It's so much better than the game you said was perfect and had no problems?

The difficulty of the game scales poorly, the world is repetitive and lacks significant location variety in most areas, the shrines are very hit or miss, the different powers are mostly boring and inconsequential besides Stasis, and the story and writing suck ass. I genuinely think this game has a great formula, much better than most open world games, and that's why people love it. I just think it's a very flawed execution of that formula. I liked it enough to finish it but was left more frustrated than satisfied in the end.

Anyways, there's nearly no reason to come back to this now. Nintendo proved my point by making the same game again but far better in nearly every way. Also fuck this game for dooming the industry to 10 decades of open world hell. It was already heading that way but I think this was the nail in the coffin.

Man. I really wanna like this game, I do, but I’ve literally tried to play it over five times and i drop it every single time. It’s actually insane how many times I’ve told myself that id give it another chance. Well I’m SICK of it!! This shit is boring🙅‍♂️🙅‍♂️🙅‍♂️ I may play TOTK one day just to shit on it and make some fanboys mad but that’s where I want my interaction with modern Zelda to end. I gotta play some actual good shit like Windwaker. Matter of fact, that’s what I’m GONNA do! I’m gonna play WINDWAKER!!!

hard to say much about what's essentially a super super early alpha demo, but seeing as development has apparently been halted, i'm choosing to think about it as an Object Which Exists In Its Current State, that is to say, one which is as equally deserving of evaluation as anything else (which is to say, not at all). sorry about that lol.

anyways, there are some nice bits and pieces here - the silent rainstorm always on screen like a kind of soothing digital noise, the decaying transformers and rusted-out girders that your little alien guy climbs around on, it has a charming vibe. unfortunately the premise of the game (fighting against another little alien guy), while present in this form of the game, is so barebones as to be basically unplayable. your dude can throw a flimsy punch and wiggle his arms around a little, but that's nowhere near enough to stop the onslaught of haymakers and suplexes from your opponent. i spent like an hour trying to beat the first enemy today, and i hit a wall where, while i could consistently land way more punches than he did (like 2 or 3:1), i'd still get knocked out every time. you can't counter his close range moves and you apparently have far less health than him or something, idk. again, such complaints about such a skeletal game is a little silly, but i wanted to point out that despite this, my experience was still chill. there's a lot of charm to an abandoned project, something the creator clearly put a lot of passion into and which playing it almost feels like lost media. i hope this game gets an update one day

Probably the best conversation piece in my collection, which is saying a lot, Terrifying 9/11 is a strange work of heated anti-imperialist schadenfreude gestating a surprisingly competent Metal Slug port for Game Boy Color that outdoes its Neo-Geo Pocket Color siblings in terms of faithfulness to the original game
Some speculate, based solely off the game's remarkable adherence to its source material, that this may have been an official port from Takara (who made numerous SNK ports for GBC) that got canceled, and I can definitely see that
The dialogue is incredibly tone-deaf, especially because this came out in 2002, but it's precisely its status as a cursed artifact that makes it interesting
It's the kind of thing that feels like it should only exist as deliberate satire, like somebody made a video game out of an article from The Onion, but yet this game bafflingly occupies the status of being naïve camp, and not deliberate
It's a weird sight as an American who lived through its cultural shockwaves in the haziest fog of early memory, who knows people who were personally impacted by this tragedy, to imagine the people who created this in 2002, a room full of people so far removed from the national trauma that shaped multiple generations that they found it fit to use our seismic cataclysm as gag gift wrapping for a (probably) laundered incomplete prototype game?
Who can forget Osama bin Laden himself telling GWB "I DIDN'T DO THE ATTACKS. NO EVIDENCE."? and then having that juxtaposed with a shockingly faithful rendition of one of the best run-n-gun games ever made, on a platform where it shouldn't exist, on top of knowing that this isn't some rom hack or another form of satire but rather a real commercial product somebody found fit to sell on store shelves?
Don't mean to be disrespectful towards people who were impacted by 9/11, rather, I think this game's existence makes some sort of point on just how quickly 9/11 entered a purgatorial state of existing as a cultural unreality. 9/11 became realer than real, for us it redefined the boundaries between private and public for the next century, the rest of us rebuilding our cities and psyches around the negative space the towers left, for them, they were so far removed from it that within a year they laughed at us, or, if you prefer, were so far removed from our psychic scars that 9/11 was just another brand to capitalize from them, either way, this game was immaculately conceived by the anonymous cultural subconscious in some twisted act of hyperreality, outside the mortal bounds of good taste, and copyright, trauma, and visible intent.
Worth 70 bucks to me, when faced with the financial choice between a new-in-box next gen game and...this, the choice is obvious, 4/5 would "buy off an obscure regional competitor to eBay in a country I don't live in" again
Limited Run wouldn't have the balls to reprint this lmao

This game and series deserve so much more than it got. The Darkness 2 is still my personal favorite FPS combat system. They were truly on to something with the combat.

The story is pretty good, but it doesn't particularly leave a lasting impression.

I would die to see The Darkness 3. A game that expands upon this game's combat with better enemy and level design could go down as one of the best first person shooters of all time.