Terra Nil is a game that attempts to subvert common city builder tropes. With an environmentalist mindset, the aim of the game is to essentially work backwards and turn destroyed, barren wastelands into thriving ecosystems, wiping any trace of your influence, and leaving.

It's a great premise for a game. But it lacks the foundational complexity of city builders to really be much more than a painfully linear experience who's entire purpose is nothing other than subversion. As a result, the game plays almost the exact same way every time, and what's being played can more or less rather simply be dumbed down to 'try to maximise the amount of tiles'. It becomes less about planning as a result, and more like a loose jigsaw puzzle that can only really be completed in a few number of ways.

Games are more than the sum of their parts. I can't honestly judge a game by picking it apart and estimating its value through its individual components because that defeats the purpose of examining how I actually felt playing it. That being said, I genuinely don't see what the fuss is about with this game. I don't think I would have lost much by just looking it up and watching someone else play it on Youtube.

With a practically Peanut Butter and Chocolate tier brilliant combination of extremely satisfying, enemy feedback oriented Diablo-esque combat and the Vampire Survivors gameplay loop, Halls of Torment carves its identity out amongst the myriad of VS clones and sets a new standard for the Bullet Heaven genre. This game offers a twin-stick variation of the vampire survivors gameplay loop with various improvements to immersion through a diegetic in game hub and game systems that grant really play-style shifting gear unlocks, 7(so far) play-style shifting, distinct character classes, potion crafting, quests, map objectives and 3 (so far) engaging and visually interesting levels.

IMPROVEMENTS ON THE GENRE

One of my most adored parts of the Vampire Survivors gameplay loop is when that game would throw various patterns of enemies at you in quick succession to displace you in interesting ways. Sadly, when it wasn't doing that, the game felt like it was meandering. You often never actually needed to move anywhere past 100 feet of where you spawned, and more often than not you where rounding up enemies in circles to mow them down in a nice ball of experience. Halls of Torment dresses this in a number of really interesting ways.

The first one is through various map objectives and quests. The game has you collect gear and deliver it to a well so you can later buy it from a merchant in the main hub. It has you collecting reagents to craft potions to unlock various ways to enhance, re-roll or get rid of level up cards. It has you on the hunt for various quests related to the progression of your character that add the aforementioned game systems or related to weakening the end-stage boss.

The second way is through the brilliant tightrope pacing. You ways feel like you're walking on eggshells. Dodging and weaving through enemies in a sea of endless patterns forcing you to move in unorthodox ways in order to find the path of least resistance or when you run out of options, the most ideal mobs to brute force your way through and hope for the best. This along with the narrow hitboxes culiminates an incredibly tense, dopamine inducing gameplay loop that will have your eyes glued to the screen that vampire survivors struggled to capitalise on and that this game does seemingly with buttery ease.

The third is through enemy unit differentiation and it's accompanied level design such as ghosts that pray once you face them and take 1 damage, but are immune to AoE effects when you're not facing them. Forcing you to move adjacent while facing them while the guard units whom only ever move quickly in a parallel motion to a narrow, infinite bridge map with seemingly invincible ghost knights closing in on you from each side. Between all of this you're put in really tense scenarios where the death is a foot away from you at all times. Another interesting one are the cowardly imps that back up when you face them, meaning when the game puts you in seemingly hopeless scenarios, you can use this knowledge to carve out a path. The blobs, that split into smaller variants once killed as well as leaving a poison puddle on the ground, making the prospect of killing them potentially more dangerous than leaving them alive or running past them. A lot of the enemies in this game seemingly designed with various objectives in mind to get you to strategize in interesting ways and force you into on the spot game-plans.

IN SUMMARY

There's a lot more I wanted to touch on here but this is getting way too prolonged as is. I think what Chasing Carrots has managed to build here is nothing short of amazing. It addresses practically every foreseeable fault that I have with Vampire Survivors through the incredible tightrope that is it's gameplay loop that has you clenching your teeth and hyper-focused, as well as through an appallingly rare level of character class distinction that makes the character class playstyles unique even during the end of a run. It does all this while heavily improving on what makes that game so incredibly addicting such as the satisfying combat as well as adding a ton of immersion through interesting diegetic game systems such as the gear recovery system, the potion crafting, the quests that unlock them. If I had one complaint it would be that I wish they went a little bit further with the diegesis by making quest related unlocks for the character classes and the levels as well. It seems like a missed opportunity to flesh out the world.

But honestly, for this price, how could I realistically complain? It costs more to buy a sandwich these days. And as this game is more fleshed out during it's early access phase with more content, that value proposition is going to become increasingly un-ignorable as if it wasn't already. This game goes above and beyond in everything I've ever wanted out of this genre and is one of the easiest recommendations I could ever give to a game on top of being one of the most fun gaming experiences I've had in forever. God bless.

Valheim isn't without its charms. It offers a relatively unique experience in the way of a medieval survival-craft multi-player RPG with genuinely interesting sailing mechanics and a good amount of world immersion. Beyond that and perhaps on a deeper level, it's the sheer thrill of self actuation that's enough to get a sizeable amount of people hooked on these types of games and Valheim is one of the games that strives to do this. Watching your character go from a useless idiot that can barely climb up a hill or out of water while dying to a boar to being able to sprint a marathon to the other side of the zone to hunt down trolls twice your size strikes on those chords of deep RPG satisfaction that the genre should want you to feel.

Tragically though, it's this precise thing that Valheim struggles with in one sense while being great at it in the aforementioned sense. To put it bluntly, the game is devoid of much in the way of things to do in its world to justify its length, and as a result, it slows down the pace of the game to an absolute crawl to prevent you from noticing just that. All of the game systems that should and in a sense, do have you feel as though you're growing your character also feel like they are conspiring to work against you in just how slow progress moves in the game because of multiple factors such as extremely limiting bag space, extremely limiting weight system, extremely stingy stamina mechanics, and also because of how arbitrarily punishing the penalties are for making mistakes such as dying and losing 5% of all of your experience across every skill(???) and having to corpse walk to get your things back while your being mindlessly chased by mobs. It feels like the game is very deliberately and transparently designed to slow you down as much as humanly possible without losing you entirely. This all wouldn't really be much of an issue if the game had more in the way of content to break up the monotony of fetching resources and backtracking to your base on foot or an interesting gameplay loop to keep you hooked but as it stands, all it does is force you to notice the kinks in the proverbial armour such as the sloppy combat mechanics, sloppy building mechanics, obtuse menus, buggy and stupid AI that often would rather walk into walls and trees as well as spin around in circles instead of realistically outnumbering or overpowering you, the game's movement's inability to gracefully handle elevation, especially near water. It doesn't stop there but I'll spare you.

Now this is a game that's in active development, and is seeing regular updates to its content. It could very well be, and I would hope that my complaints about it do not hold over time. But for what it is right now, I cannot in good faith recommend it to anyone but those that know exactly what they're getting themselves into. This isn't a very well rounded experience and it likely won't be for the foreseeable future. It needs more content and more polish, and It needs it quickly before it starts to show its age. I pray that it gets it before other similar games come along and bury it like many permastuck early access titles have went through.

Between the gameplay loop, endgame progression, and early game story progression, Diablo 4 seems like its having an identity crisis.

The core gameplay loop of this game needs some work. It's too heavily tilted towards staring mindlessly at the absolutely mind boggling mess of an overload of stats trying to eyeball whether or not the piece of gear you got is better than your equipped gear. Often it's entirely not worth it to sit and find out so you'll find yourself skimping on potentially better gear of a certain tier because it would be too much of a hassle to trudge through the garbage to find. Even after you consider that, you're still likely spending at least 5 minutes between dungeons, which is typically around the length of a dungeon if youre clearing it coop, sorting through items, making sure everything is in order before you go back in and rinse and repeat. That is an unacceptable amount of downtime for a game that has a relatively mundane looting system, with very little in the way of loot creativity, and is mostly fun for it's intrinsic combat.

Another big thing that gets in the way of it's intrinsic combat is the amount of story padding there is. People that play these types of games want to hurry up and get back to the killing, they don't want to be bored with long drawn out cinematic, of a frankly mediocre plot, or even worse yet, in game story pauses where you watch a bunch of dialogue boxes appear over flimsy character models and sit there and wonder when it is you can go back to the fun part. These things communicate very poorly with what the game excels at, what it tries to be, and what people play it for.

And that's really only the major problems. Between the annoyingly backtracky dungeon mission design, the lack of proper unit differentiation causing various mobs to either look a lot more threatening than they actually are or be a lot more threatening than they look, the hilariously cheap elite modifiers that seem entirely tailored into baiting you into getting killed by flashing shiny loot at you and getting you to walk into the bomb, or if youre more aware, just having to sit there and wait for the annoyingly long animation to finally finish and the level scaling mobs gutting any sense of gains in power you might feel and relegating gains in power to increasingly meta builds, the list of issues just goes on and on and I'm only really scratching the surface.

It seems as they iterate on these games, blizzard inevitably gets further from the mark. Not closer. It really is a good thing that they haven't forgotten how to make their core combat feel very satisfying because this game would be nothing without it.

Rejoice. It's time for Ubisoft to take you on another regurgitated mishmash of frustratingly contrived cutscenes and escort missions where they try to sell you on the painfully mediocre villains and side characters that you couldn't give a rat's ass about while you wonder when it is that you can shoot your weapon again. Ah, but don't worry because when you finally get there you'll immediately notice the awfully meaningless stealth and scouting mechanics when you realise that you can just walk up to anything in the game, punch them a couple times and they immediately drop dead, or better yet, just fling a bat at them because apparently that's all it takes to kill someone. And if that was where the trouble ended then it wouldn't be such a big problem but the list of issues feels essentially endless. Ubisoft's corporate homogenization has dissolved these Far Cry games into a vague slew of conflicting design ideas to appease the lowest common denominator and rake in as much money as they possibly can from the absolutely shameless and downright insulting microtransaction system in a full priced, predominately single player experience. Overall an absolutely brain rotting experience. Avoid like the plague if you have already experienced Far Cry games before, and if you haven't go play 3, or 2 and you'll get the jist.

Representing a bygone era of street racing games, most wanted absolutely clowns on its modern iterations with an unparalleled focus on sense of speed delivered through it's absolute time capsule of a soundtrack as well as it's incredibly dense with destructible objects, shortcuts and narrow, winding and slopey open world roads that at top speeds make you feel like you're on a roller coaster despite the fact that you won't break the 300 kmph mark for the vast majority of the game.

Revisiting this game unmistakably confirmed my suspicion that, despite its occasional jankiness due to an obviously lower budget, street racing games have become something of a lost art.

The cop chasing mechanics which are undeniably less samey, much more chaotic but still condusive towards player agency due to much more options of interaction in the way of destructible obstacles and many more ways to give cops the slip as they're not nearly as glued to you despite still presenting a considerable challenge.

The races themselves which focus much more on making you feel fast as opposed to giving you an arsenal of supercars to race on large sprawling mostly straight and flat roads at high speeds which strips the tension of a street race and increases the unpredictability of traffic.

The hilariously over the top but tongue-in-cheek Sin City-esque plot which highlights the absurdity of something as criminally negligent and irresponsible as street racing being viewed as a sign of social status while remaining gripping and not getting hamfistedly political as opposed to the downright insulting mediocrity of NFS Heat and Unbound's serious tone which lends a bad air of pretension to its farcical portrayal of police and local government as being these malevolent forces attempting to crack down on the oppressed and innocent street racers which is all but too easy to scoff at as this narrative is being shoved in your face while you accidentally total hordes of civilian vehicles and city property.

They just don't make em like they used to.

The customization is great. Burst NOS is an engaging mechanic. Sense of speed is good. The art direction is stunning. And while the narrative can be really jarring with it's "criminal negligence? oh yeah? well the mayor is corrupt!" scapegoat whataboutism, and being talked at in interview form by ASAP Rocky phoning it in as hard as possible, there are genuinely wholesome moments. I'd be lying if I said if it wasn't fun but it just does not reach the glory days of this franchise. OG most wanted had more organic car chases, more ways to interact with cops, to not aggro them, to give them the slip. Wipeout wasn't nearly as aggressive causing you to take more risky and in turn fun maneuvers to further incentivize cop chase craziness. The open world here is tacked on and vapid. The multiplayer is filled with bad balance, and as the meta develops, the game will suffer. People that are hyping this game up have either forgotten how good 2000s era of street racing was or just haven't played it. We're suffering from a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome. Master has finally thrown us a bone and we worship them for it as we completely neglect what we had beforehand.

Further iterations of video games are supposed to get better. Not worse and more expensive.