it's like a personified version of those feral deranged stickman violence images you know the ones

Out of all the games out there you can play this is certainly one of them

This game is such an absolute fever dream to me, I can so vividly remember being lost and frustrated as my sweaty sticky little 10yo self sat in my grandma's basement waiting for my parents to come home. This game doesn't feel real even after coming back to it.

This review contains spoilers

Amazing buildup and atmosphere, that's just like... obvious. Almost not worth commenting on for how good it is; really speaks for itself. The game makes one of the best cases for "fixed camera can be good actually" because of how well it's used... mostly. I like how the shots are framed in order to make the most sense when descending the tower, it adds tension to going back up, feeling like you're pushing up against the unknown even though you've just been there. However, some shots seem overly cruel or just straight up oversights - one or two times enemies are placed, invisibly, on the other side of camera transitions. There's at least one point I can think of where you can't see the lower half of your body when you're trying to get onto some stairs, and it's unreasonably easy to get caught on the environment. This specific example (second combat room after the blue pool checkpoint) is especially bad because it's clearly a room you're meant to run instead of fight through. This wouldn't be so bad without some of the issues that exist with the movement, though. Movement feels floaty with little start or endlag as far as I can tell. The light in front of the player is pretty insufficient to show which direction you're facing due to its splotchy vagueness. A narrower cone of light with harder edges would be much more useful. Combat is expectedly simple but suffers from the above problems, as well as some others. Poor movement/turning feedback is compounded by the inconsistent auto-aim that's especially bad at close range. At point-blank range, bullets will pass straight through enemies, combined with (as far as I can tell) the lack of recovery i-frames, death can feel frustrating. It would go a long way to give the player a shove move or just... fix the ghost bullet issue.
If I wanted to nitpick I could say that the descent down the spire doesn't feel very... down-ful, somehow. The main reason is probably that you aren't given very many good views of the swamp from above, and you never get a good idea of your progression relative to the height of the trees. When you get to the bottom, the swamp is disappointingly small. The atmosphere established there is great but you never really feel like the setup has been fully paid off. It would've been much better to take time and resources away from the many redundant rooms of the spire to let the swamp reach its full potential. There are enough setpieces throughout the Spire, it wouldn't have hurt to cut one or two (my vote goes to the CLEARLY UNFAIR mukbang room near the top).
Another random suggestion that might help the experience is imposing an ammo limit, where you can't pick up any more till you shoot some off. It would make going up the Spire a bit more engaging and force the player to conserve ammo, paradoxically making the game easier for those who were both good scavengers and overly trigger-happy.
Overall a good experience that's easy to recommend. I don't know how much I'll add to the world by going off on this game that's so obscure the backloggd page isn't even set up properly. I kinda have to hope the dev(s?) see this cause I think there's a lot of good here. Keep it up.

"Fun with friends" only gets you so far but it's at least very true here

Overcommitting to the concept of 100% customizable guns leaves us with holding down/spam clicking m1+m2 as the dominant strategy. Cooldowns and shot delay aren't significant enough for much any thought to be put into when you shoot, and spread effects are significant enough for little thought to be put into where you shoot. Somewhat satisfying at the start but honestly just play ultrakill please

Very questionable weapon balance, non-functional anti-cheat, several poorly designed maps and an entire gamemode that is kinda shitty from the ground up (CTF). Yeah, this is the greatest competitive shooter ever made.

The jokes largely just don't hit, and a game like this absolutely lives or dies on its jokes. Probably just best reserved for being extremely wasted with your friends.

The main issue with this one is that the victor in a combat situation can be almost mathematically determined. If one person has more health/shield than the other, that person will almost ALWAYS win the engagement. if that's equal then If one person has a superior gun at the range of engagement (rifle for long shotgun for short, etc) then that person will almost ALWAYS win the engagement. If that's equal, then the person who saw the other first will almost ALWAYS win the engagement. If all that's equal then sure, use of cover, game sense, and aiming skill will be factors but most of your time in rounds will focus sharply on optimizing the first few things I mentioned anyways. This can be empowering since a lot of the time, you'll still make it reasonably far in a round due to tons of people taking high risk gambles early on and dying out. It's certainly gratifying to know that "oh wow I did better than 80% of the players!" but what I'm trying to say is that there is absolutely no reason that me, someone who is to this day pure ass at aiming and movement in other shooters, can consistently make top 20. So few of the choices I make that bring me there rely on skill or strategy, and therefore are essentially meaningless. Furthermore there's absolutely minimal room to express the skills that do play a factor, since it really boils down to aiming skill and mastery of a movement system comparable in depth to moving a cube around in a void in blender. Many other shooters make even that more interesting by having not only alternate movement options, but making the higher damaging weapons projectile based instead of hitscan based, and just about everything in fortnite is hitscan, surprise surprise, lowering both the skill floor and ceiling in one fell swoop. Not only this but the exploration and resource gathering that will give you the edge isn't hugely interesting either, being just mildly entertaining at best, boiling down to finding a location and systematically walking into every room and destroying floors and walls. Sometimes you find something, sometimes you don't but the point is that there isn't really much to it. All in all Fortnite is a bunch of shallow boring ideas executed in a shallow boring manner, wrapped up in a package that I can't really call high quality.

Endearing story on top of being one of the most absolutely fucking beautiful games ever. There are some narrative hiccups here and there and a couple strangely written lines throughout, the game is totally unpretentious and totally satisfies what it sets out for.

Very ambitious combat system that is excellent in so many ways but chained down in a few others. Most obvious of which is a campaign that consistently puts 3's worst moments to shame and this is such a notorious issue that I don't even feel compelled to elaborate further. There's also the case of boss fights that have a HUGE range in quality from a couple that are really great to a couple others that are boring tedious bullshit. The enemy design is sometimes on par with what the series has seen before and since, not to mention one enemy type that is arguably the most enjoyable to fight in the whole series. For the most part though, too many enemies are just dull to fight on their own, and taken as a whole the roster is pretty lacking and gimmicky. Moving on, Dante's weapons are a bit awkward to use unless at the highest tiers of the skill ceiling, but once you reach those heights it's really excellent - provided you can actually find an interesting and well-designed combat encounter to use your skills on, because most of those are brief moments buried in larger missions, or deep, deep into the bloody palace.

With all that said yeah pretty fun I guess.

I know it's funny and I know someone made a whole game about why this game is some subversive artsy experience but really, it's just broken. The physics and controls feel inconsistent and unintuitive, and it's immensely buggy, janky, and exploitable

Game is actually very solid for a minecraft clone, the electricity system is arguably as sophisticated as redstone was at the time there is of course a pretty great amount of creativity and versatility available to you