KrissyB
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Fishing is a relaxing activity, they couldn’t possibly make it scary, right? Right?
Dredge gives off a very ordinary vibe for a fishing game from an outside perspective, but when you sink your teeth into this game, you’ll quickly find out that this game has a darker undertone. To give a synopsis on what this game is about, you play as a local fisherman, who simply fishes to get by. You start off by paying your debt back to the mayor of Great Marrow to pay off the tugboat you’ve been given in good will, and as you meet the townsfolk, you come to learn that the tides aren’t so favourable out there. A lot of people have been going missing out at sea as of late, and a lot of the sea inhabitants aren’t quite their usual selves. Before you know it, it’s up to you, and you alone to work out the mystery to the infestation of the seven seas.
The gameplay loop is fairly straightforward, with five major regions to travel across, from the break of dawn, you’ll receive fetch and delivery-like quests from the residents and lost inhabitants of the world, as well as catch from a compendium of over 150 fish, including standard amphibians, as well as ‘aberrations’, which are transmogrified variations of the standard. Most of the time, you’ll be catching fish in bulk to sell, so you can upgrade your ship and equipment, the pay-out scaling based on the sizes, the variations, and the condition, which deteriorates the longer you keep it in your cargo bay, all until it rots into a puddle of worthless mucus.
At night, however, that’s where this game showcases its horrifying underbelly. If you’re caught out at sea in the middle of the night, your mind begins to be consumed into a state of delirium, and as the night progresses, you’ll lose sight of everything that’s in front of you, and even see things that aren’t supposed to be there, or at least, not how they really appear. At night, the sanity meter begins to kick in, and with each stage, shifting more from the deceiving side of accidents, to completely hostile. Hearing faint whispers in the night, to your dinghy little watercraft being a little… temperamental, every little mishap can make each night a living nightmare. There are methods to slow down the process, and even knock it down a peg, but the only sure-fire way to bring yourself back down to Earth is to pull yourself to shore and rest it off, such a necessity that if not seen to, can even bleed into affecting you in the daytime.
With this game only being a rough 20 hours to be able to 100%, not including the DLC, I think that this game has enough to be able to keep a player engaged to see it through to the end. The gameplay as already explained is simple, yet I found it enjoyable, the world and its characters compliment the seas and its demented scaly residents, and the soundtrack keeps you in whatever mindset that the game will deem necessary. In a moment's notice, I’m joyfully casting out a fishing line, and the next, “oh god oh god oh god you’re not real you’re not real!”
I think that giving this game a 7/10 is a nice, positive score to give to Dredge. Being Black Salt Games’ first and currently, their only published game, if you want to support a brand new, up and coming independent games studio, and Dredge appeals to you in any capacity, I would absolutely recommend you give it a go.
Dredge gives off a very ordinary vibe for a fishing game from an outside perspective, but when you sink your teeth into this game, you’ll quickly find out that this game has a darker undertone. To give a synopsis on what this game is about, you play as a local fisherman, who simply fishes to get by. You start off by paying your debt back to the mayor of Great Marrow to pay off the tugboat you’ve been given in good will, and as you meet the townsfolk, you come to learn that the tides aren’t so favourable out there. A lot of people have been going missing out at sea as of late, and a lot of the sea inhabitants aren’t quite their usual selves. Before you know it, it’s up to you, and you alone to work out the mystery to the infestation of the seven seas.
The gameplay loop is fairly straightforward, with five major regions to travel across, from the break of dawn, you’ll receive fetch and delivery-like quests from the residents and lost inhabitants of the world, as well as catch from a compendium of over 150 fish, including standard amphibians, as well as ‘aberrations’, which are transmogrified variations of the standard. Most of the time, you’ll be catching fish in bulk to sell, so you can upgrade your ship and equipment, the pay-out scaling based on the sizes, the variations, and the condition, which deteriorates the longer you keep it in your cargo bay, all until it rots into a puddle of worthless mucus.
At night, however, that’s where this game showcases its horrifying underbelly. If you’re caught out at sea in the middle of the night, your mind begins to be consumed into a state of delirium, and as the night progresses, you’ll lose sight of everything that’s in front of you, and even see things that aren’t supposed to be there, or at least, not how they really appear. At night, the sanity meter begins to kick in, and with each stage, shifting more from the deceiving side of accidents, to completely hostile. Hearing faint whispers in the night, to your dinghy little watercraft being a little… temperamental, every little mishap can make each night a living nightmare. There are methods to slow down the process, and even knock it down a peg, but the only sure-fire way to bring yourself back down to Earth is to pull yourself to shore and rest it off, such a necessity that if not seen to, can even bleed into affecting you in the daytime.
With this game only being a rough 20 hours to be able to 100%, not including the DLC, I think that this game has enough to be able to keep a player engaged to see it through to the end. The gameplay as already explained is simple, yet I found it enjoyable, the world and its characters compliment the seas and its demented scaly residents, and the soundtrack keeps you in whatever mindset that the game will deem necessary. In a moment's notice, I’m joyfully casting out a fishing line, and the next, “oh god oh god oh god you’re not real you’re not real!”
I think that giving this game a 7/10 is a nice, positive score to give to Dredge. Being Black Salt Games’ first and currently, their only published game, if you want to support a brand new, up and coming independent games studio, and Dredge appeals to you in any capacity, I would absolutely recommend you give it a go.
When I picked up Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, I only was given one proper impression on this game. “Oh, it’s JUST like Jet Set Radio, like a spiritual successor.” By the time I picked this game up, I didn’t have access to a platform that I could play Jet Set on, but by time I did, I still decided that I should play Bomb Rush Cyberfunk first.
In Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, you play as a wide-spread cast of hip-hopping graffiti artists with a knack for skating into unconventional places, known as writers. These writers are divided into different territories and gangs, all with a common goal, to go ‘All-City’, and claim every territory in town under their own banner, whilst your crew, The Bomb Rush Crew, or particularly the protagonist, Red, are trying to work out the identity to the body that his cyberhead is sitting as a host to.
The gameplay loop is fairly simple. With your choice of skating equipment, and your welcome gift of a yellow can of spray paint, skate, grind, and wall-run into all of these unconventional spots in the region to make your mark in the region, and build a reputation to get your crew recognised by the gangs in charge. You’ll also have to outshine some of their thugs on the way before you can battle it out to get the highest score that you can in order to claim the territory for the BRC. Going into this a little bit, what I think is the highlight of the game, and thankfully so, being the focus of the game, is the traversal and tricks. The tricks system in this game is quite streamlined, throwing out stick inputs and for the most part, using the face buttons for your trick inputs, they’ve managed to keep the amount of tricks refreshing with multiple forms of skating techniques, with skateboarding, inline skating and cycling, mixing in having to uphold manuals and mixing boosts into your combinations to pull out high-scoring maneuvers to keep your string going until you can bounce onto the next billboard in sight.
This was absolutely the most important part of the game, which leads onto the head-to-head comparisons with Jet Set (the artstyle also pushes the topic on), and while the gameplay hits the nail on the head, it doesn’t sink in perfectly, due to another core mechanic. This is my main criticism of the game, and whilst I get that it’s here to up the stakes and be an obstacle, if it had more of a focus, it could’ve done this game even more favors. Leaving out a calling card for the BRC attracts attention, and after a while, that attention could be of the authorities, and as you keep tagging the environment, they’ll continue to bring the heavy artillery. You can fight back, though you can typically avoid the standard officers so long as they don’t start shooting at close range. The worst of them all though, are the turrets that start appearing when your heat reaches level 2. Whoever decided to add these turrets, I hope you know what you are. You killed enough of my combos, and I am very sad about it. But for real, the combat, and the suppressing force that the police bring to the game were a bit of a detriment to me, I would’ve been happy enough even if I was just offered sandbox settings after finishing the main story, I wanna see that big number go bigger and not have to even think about it.
I won’t dwell any further into the story, I’ve already given a general synopsis, but it was a pretty standard story, though not a lot of time to really go deep into most of the cast's stories. The soundtrack though, it's easy to say that I love it. For a similar reason to why people love the Tony Hawk games, a brilliant soundtrack to compliment the gameplay helps you feel in the moment.
Overall, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a good case of style-over-substance. The artstyle helps the game stand out from this generation's current line of releases, and the soundtrack helps keep this game going, but it’s not like the substance is missing. I think that Team Reptile have something good brewing with this game, and if this is merely a “spiritual successor”, then it’s a very good example of that, as it still has me wanting more.
6/10 should hold me over for this game, I had fun with it, and if you like hitting buttons and scoring millions of points at a time, I’d say to try it for yourself.
In Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, you play as a wide-spread cast of hip-hopping graffiti artists with a knack for skating into unconventional places, known as writers. These writers are divided into different territories and gangs, all with a common goal, to go ‘All-City’, and claim every territory in town under their own banner, whilst your crew, The Bomb Rush Crew, or particularly the protagonist, Red, are trying to work out the identity to the body that his cyberhead is sitting as a host to.
The gameplay loop is fairly simple. With your choice of skating equipment, and your welcome gift of a yellow can of spray paint, skate, grind, and wall-run into all of these unconventional spots in the region to make your mark in the region, and build a reputation to get your crew recognised by the gangs in charge. You’ll also have to outshine some of their thugs on the way before you can battle it out to get the highest score that you can in order to claim the territory for the BRC. Going into this a little bit, what I think is the highlight of the game, and thankfully so, being the focus of the game, is the traversal and tricks. The tricks system in this game is quite streamlined, throwing out stick inputs and for the most part, using the face buttons for your trick inputs, they’ve managed to keep the amount of tricks refreshing with multiple forms of skating techniques, with skateboarding, inline skating and cycling, mixing in having to uphold manuals and mixing boosts into your combinations to pull out high-scoring maneuvers to keep your string going until you can bounce onto the next billboard in sight.
This was absolutely the most important part of the game, which leads onto the head-to-head comparisons with Jet Set (the artstyle also pushes the topic on), and while the gameplay hits the nail on the head, it doesn’t sink in perfectly, due to another core mechanic. This is my main criticism of the game, and whilst I get that it’s here to up the stakes and be an obstacle, if it had more of a focus, it could’ve done this game even more favors. Leaving out a calling card for the BRC attracts attention, and after a while, that attention could be of the authorities, and as you keep tagging the environment, they’ll continue to bring the heavy artillery. You can fight back, though you can typically avoid the standard officers so long as they don’t start shooting at close range. The worst of them all though, are the turrets that start appearing when your heat reaches level 2. Whoever decided to add these turrets, I hope you know what you are. You killed enough of my combos, and I am very sad about it. But for real, the combat, and the suppressing force that the police bring to the game were a bit of a detriment to me, I would’ve been happy enough even if I was just offered sandbox settings after finishing the main story, I wanna see that big number go bigger and not have to even think about it.
I won’t dwell any further into the story, I’ve already given a general synopsis, but it was a pretty standard story, though not a lot of time to really go deep into most of the cast's stories. The soundtrack though, it's easy to say that I love it. For a similar reason to why people love the Tony Hawk games, a brilliant soundtrack to compliment the gameplay helps you feel in the moment.
Overall, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a good case of style-over-substance. The artstyle helps the game stand out from this generation's current line of releases, and the soundtrack helps keep this game going, but it’s not like the substance is missing. I think that Team Reptile have something good brewing with this game, and if this is merely a “spiritual successor”, then it’s a very good example of that, as it still has me wanting more.
6/10 should hold me over for this game, I had fun with it, and if you like hitting buttons and scoring millions of points at a time, I’d say to try it for yourself.
REVIEW ORIGINALLY WRITTEN AND POSTED ON MARCH 3RD 2023
Oh, boy. I’ve been putting this one off, but here we go.
So Wanted: Dead found its way onto my radar when a friend showed me the trailer to this game at work. Off of this trailer, I got hooked on wanting to get this game for months, so much that I decided to pick up a collectors edition of the game, as my optimism for the game went hand-in-hand with all the nice little pieces that came with this edition of the game, but to my bewilderment, opening up these items was one of the best parts that came with purchasing this game.
Off of the promotion from this game, the game gave me the impression that this was going to be a very fast-paced hack-and-slash set in a very colourful cyberpunk-like universe, with an impressionable cast of characters that I was hoping to love when one of the first things that I saw in this game was the classic roast GIF recreated with the main characters in this game. Oh, how wrong was I?
To dive a little deeper into the general gameplay of this game, the gameplay from the trailers was compared a lot to games like Ninja Gaiden, but also introduced some third person shooting sprinkled on top. The gunplay is simple, with an assault rifle and a sidearm constantly on deck, as well as a secondary which you can pick up a variety of guns from the enemy forces as you take them out. The gunplay was featured, but not highlighted as the main aspect of the gameplay in the trailers, which is why I was very confused playing through the game and finding out just how much it feels like they actually prioritized this, and how it feels mandatory to abuse the gunplay against the shoddy AI through the game bearably.
I remember rushing into the very first section in the game and getting gunned down right away with all of the enemies being scattered across this giant lobby room. Immediately, I’m having to throw the hack-and-slash out the window, and play the game the way that they clearly intended… A cover shooter. At a moment's notice, I was actually playing The Division, and if you know me, you know that I really don’t get along with the recent line of Tom Clancy games. This goes on for most of the first stage of the game, and there’s only five stages in this entire game, so 20% of the way through, and I still haven’t gotten to really play the game the way that they very prominently promoted and pulled me in with, no matter how much they wanted to launch tutorials at me on the melee combat, as well. I would say that it fortunately turned around in the second stage of the game, and I finally got to play around with the melee a lot more, but that’s where we really started to spiral downwards with this game.
Whatever you learned in the tutorial, you may as well throw it out of the window, because none of it is actually going to help you get far. The combos are so simple, yet feel so rough to perform, probably thanks to the game not consistently reading inputs (oh boy I have a bone to pick with this) and even if you decide you want to even try and use these combos, just be ready for even the weakest of grunts armouring through the combo and rinsing your health from one tap. There was times where just tapping square was a bit of mindless fun, but that was well after I decided that this game wasn’t what I wanted out of it, and wanted to be done with it, AND THAT’S WHEN THE ARBITRARY DIFFICULTY SPIKES COME INTO PLAY!
Most of the enemies in this game are unnecessarily damage sponges, and on top of that, the resources that you get in this game are incredibly scarce, and are also randomly generated whenever they actually appear. If an enemy even drops some ammo when you kill them, you’ll usually get 10 bullets for whatever gun they was holding onto, and while you’re already getting a small amount, you can’t hold onto a lot of ammo either. No more than two full magazines in the reserve, actually. While it seems like a nitpick, what doesn’t help is the stat tradeoffs with the gun customisation. Every kind of attachment has stat increases and decreases, and one of the main tradeoffs that comes with increasing your magazine size and ammo count, is your damage with that gun for some reason. By the way, unless you happen to have the Flying Pig as your secondary weapon, a fair few of these enemies will take every single bullet you can hold in your primary, AND secondary weapons, all while still being ready for a good sword fight. Oh, but at least the handgun has infinite ammo with lock-on. That’s gotta be good if you decide to cheese out the katana wielding enemies, right? Hahaha, fuck… Just so I don’t keep complaining excessively, I’ll just add on a quick note that on top of the problems with the enemies and their iron resolve and the lack of resources, the checkpoint system is a huge blow to the games progression as well. The amount of times that I’ve been sent so far back in this game because of these checkpoints being a marathon apart at times just hurts so bad.
The gameplay isn’t the only place where this game falls on its face. Honestly, there’s hardly anywhere that the game has a gracious landing on. The game has a very nice soundtrack, however it feels like a lot of the music was used in the wrong places in the game. I couldn’t even slightly tell you what the story of this game was, looking back on it. Some zombie defence force that barely even fought any zombies, or something? The characters were also immensely flat as well, and the voice acting felt like it was pulled from the first table read of the script, getting to know what they were working with, rather than actually getting into the studio to act it out. I think I only liked one character in the entire game, and she wasn’t even a part of the main team, either. She was just the gunsmith who also showed up once or twice in the final stage of the game.
This one hurts the most, however. There’s a selection of mini-games in this game, including an old-school arcade game (which no one seems to be able to finish by the way) and one of my favourite mini-games thanks to Yakuza, karaoke. Now, the Yakuza games created a perfect formula for karaoke if you ask me. Nothing complicated, hit the buttons to match the rhythm, it’s worked for so many games, and others have imitated this format with no trouble. SO HOW DID THIS GAME MANAGE TO IMITATE SAID STYLE, AND DO IT WRONG!? I said I had a bone to pick with the ghosting button inputs, and this is exactly why, but on top of that, trying to overcomplicate the game with a LOT more buttons, having to hit multiple buttons at the same time, AND the combination of buttons they want you to hit with zero reaction time. If you can’t get the karaoke right, then I’m sorry, but it’s all over.
To thankfully conclude my review on Wanted: Dead, it’s not often at all that I think to sell a game on when I finish it. Wanted: Dead was one of those games. I was very excited to play this game, and once the main game was all said and done, I had absolutely no motivation to ever consider going back to it to finish the 100%, which is good, because it still appears that almost three weeks after the game has released, it’s still bugged, and nobody can get the 100%. By time I finished playing the game, I was sitting on a 3, maybe 3.5/10, but after writing this, and really putting the whole game into perspective, I think I was just holding on to hoping that this game was going to be something great. It’s an amazing idea on paper, but there’s no execution. 2/10, sadly.
Oh, boy. I’ve been putting this one off, but here we go.
So Wanted: Dead found its way onto my radar when a friend showed me the trailer to this game at work. Off of this trailer, I got hooked on wanting to get this game for months, so much that I decided to pick up a collectors edition of the game, as my optimism for the game went hand-in-hand with all the nice little pieces that came with this edition of the game, but to my bewilderment, opening up these items was one of the best parts that came with purchasing this game.
Off of the promotion from this game, the game gave me the impression that this was going to be a very fast-paced hack-and-slash set in a very colourful cyberpunk-like universe, with an impressionable cast of characters that I was hoping to love when one of the first things that I saw in this game was the classic roast GIF recreated with the main characters in this game. Oh, how wrong was I?
To dive a little deeper into the general gameplay of this game, the gameplay from the trailers was compared a lot to games like Ninja Gaiden, but also introduced some third person shooting sprinkled on top. The gunplay is simple, with an assault rifle and a sidearm constantly on deck, as well as a secondary which you can pick up a variety of guns from the enemy forces as you take them out. The gunplay was featured, but not highlighted as the main aspect of the gameplay in the trailers, which is why I was very confused playing through the game and finding out just how much it feels like they actually prioritized this, and how it feels mandatory to abuse the gunplay against the shoddy AI through the game bearably.
I remember rushing into the very first section in the game and getting gunned down right away with all of the enemies being scattered across this giant lobby room. Immediately, I’m having to throw the hack-and-slash out the window, and play the game the way that they clearly intended… A cover shooter. At a moment's notice, I was actually playing The Division, and if you know me, you know that I really don’t get along with the recent line of Tom Clancy games. This goes on for most of the first stage of the game, and there’s only five stages in this entire game, so 20% of the way through, and I still haven’t gotten to really play the game the way that they very prominently promoted and pulled me in with, no matter how much they wanted to launch tutorials at me on the melee combat, as well. I would say that it fortunately turned around in the second stage of the game, and I finally got to play around with the melee a lot more, but that’s where we really started to spiral downwards with this game.
Whatever you learned in the tutorial, you may as well throw it out of the window, because none of it is actually going to help you get far. The combos are so simple, yet feel so rough to perform, probably thanks to the game not consistently reading inputs (oh boy I have a bone to pick with this) and even if you decide you want to even try and use these combos, just be ready for even the weakest of grunts armouring through the combo and rinsing your health from one tap. There was times where just tapping square was a bit of mindless fun, but that was well after I decided that this game wasn’t what I wanted out of it, and wanted to be done with it, AND THAT’S WHEN THE ARBITRARY DIFFICULTY SPIKES COME INTO PLAY!
Most of the enemies in this game are unnecessarily damage sponges, and on top of that, the resources that you get in this game are incredibly scarce, and are also randomly generated whenever they actually appear. If an enemy even drops some ammo when you kill them, you’ll usually get 10 bullets for whatever gun they was holding onto, and while you’re already getting a small amount, you can’t hold onto a lot of ammo either. No more than two full magazines in the reserve, actually. While it seems like a nitpick, what doesn’t help is the stat tradeoffs with the gun customisation. Every kind of attachment has stat increases and decreases, and one of the main tradeoffs that comes with increasing your magazine size and ammo count, is your damage with that gun for some reason. By the way, unless you happen to have the Flying Pig as your secondary weapon, a fair few of these enemies will take every single bullet you can hold in your primary, AND secondary weapons, all while still being ready for a good sword fight. Oh, but at least the handgun has infinite ammo with lock-on. That’s gotta be good if you decide to cheese out the katana wielding enemies, right? Hahaha, fuck… Just so I don’t keep complaining excessively, I’ll just add on a quick note that on top of the problems with the enemies and their iron resolve and the lack of resources, the checkpoint system is a huge blow to the games progression as well. The amount of times that I’ve been sent so far back in this game because of these checkpoints being a marathon apart at times just hurts so bad.
The gameplay isn’t the only place where this game falls on its face. Honestly, there’s hardly anywhere that the game has a gracious landing on. The game has a very nice soundtrack, however it feels like a lot of the music was used in the wrong places in the game. I couldn’t even slightly tell you what the story of this game was, looking back on it. Some zombie defence force that barely even fought any zombies, or something? The characters were also immensely flat as well, and the voice acting felt like it was pulled from the first table read of the script, getting to know what they were working with, rather than actually getting into the studio to act it out. I think I only liked one character in the entire game, and she wasn’t even a part of the main team, either. She was just the gunsmith who also showed up once or twice in the final stage of the game.
This one hurts the most, however. There’s a selection of mini-games in this game, including an old-school arcade game (which no one seems to be able to finish by the way) and one of my favourite mini-games thanks to Yakuza, karaoke. Now, the Yakuza games created a perfect formula for karaoke if you ask me. Nothing complicated, hit the buttons to match the rhythm, it’s worked for so many games, and others have imitated this format with no trouble. SO HOW DID THIS GAME MANAGE TO IMITATE SAID STYLE, AND DO IT WRONG!? I said I had a bone to pick with the ghosting button inputs, and this is exactly why, but on top of that, trying to overcomplicate the game with a LOT more buttons, having to hit multiple buttons at the same time, AND the combination of buttons they want you to hit with zero reaction time. If you can’t get the karaoke right, then I’m sorry, but it’s all over.
To thankfully conclude my review on Wanted: Dead, it’s not often at all that I think to sell a game on when I finish it. Wanted: Dead was one of those games. I was very excited to play this game, and once the main game was all said and done, I had absolutely no motivation to ever consider going back to it to finish the 100%, which is good, because it still appears that almost three weeks after the game has released, it’s still bugged, and nobody can get the 100%. By time I finished playing the game, I was sitting on a 3, maybe 3.5/10, but after writing this, and really putting the whole game into perspective, I think I was just holding on to hoping that this game was going to be something great. It’s an amazing idea on paper, but there’s no execution. 2/10, sadly.