fights in tight spaces does a very good (or at least interesting?) job of translating the mechanics of cinematic fighting into the Digital Realm, but fails at capturing the emotional satisfaction which makes such fighting so captivating. it's no surprise that video games like this & sifu would try to recreate john wick style shit, just look at how many other movies are ripping it off right now. the problem is, how do you translate thousands of hours of training and careful choreography designed to look effortlessly skilled into something that a player without any training or choreography can immediately pick up on? the approach here is to break it down into turns, each punch and kick and grapple is an individual card you can deploy and you're unbound by the temporal realm, so you've essentially replaced instinct with unlimited time to think. this is a very solid approach and it works well in a lot of places, especially in the early game where the difficulty is reasonable and you have some freedom to experiment with your approach. this is far from the first game to try something like this (i mean, even xcom basically does this stuff), but it's the first i've played to use it as a means of expressing cinematic combat, and for that i do think it's a worthwhile experiment.

the game fails in two big ways however - for one, and as many others have pointed out, the difficulty curve is just insane. by the second or third stage you're being bombarded with overwhelming numbers of enemies in incredibly crowded spaces which all have varied attacks that you simply can't deal with. i'm sure some of this is due to my own lack of skill, but i'm seeing similar complaints from steam reviewers with hundreds of hours so idk lol.
this is such a big problem for me because of the second big way this game fails - this difficulty curve brings out the inherent problems in using roguelike mechanics to represent this type of fighting. you ultimately are beholden to the luck of the draw, and if you get into a particularly dicey situation, you can very easily find yourself in a situation where you know exactly what moves are necessary to win the fight but simply do not have access to them. that's pretty normal for roguelikes, but it feels very bad when i'm supposed to be a rama style badass!! there's a tangible difference between dying and having to restart at a checkpoint in an action game because you took a bad punch vs. losing a roguelike because you made a bad decision an hour and a half ago, and it is a difference which does not lend itself well to a genre full of instinct and prowess and that Effortlessness i mentioned earlier. so yeah give this one a try maybe but play something else if you're looking for the Sick Movie Kung Fu In Gaming which i described above

possibly my favorite recent roguelike, not so much because i find it particularly innovative or interesting to think about - it is those things, in some small ways, and i don't think it has to be those things to be a good game - but because the developer's labor and the love he has for the genre bleed thick through the screen. you can see bits and pieces of every big roguelike of the last decade in here, not just direct references (although those are plentiful) but in the design decisions; you can feel hades when you level up, nuclear throne in the enemy encounters, isaac because it's always set in a little square ass room.

the core gameplay loop is very very simple even for what you'd expect out of the genre, you follow a direct line from first room through shop after tavern after boss encounter until you reach the Final Guy, it's a linear hallway full of doors where behind each door is a random room... in a way this basic formula closely resembles the NoEnd House creepypasta, or perhaps it makes more sense to say that the NoEnd House has a very video-game-like structure.

complication comes via the eight bajillion stats that your character has which can be manipulated via items and potions and shit. the amount of text presented on screen in any given menu can feel overwhelming at first, but with time i found that (like many roguelikes) you can sort of ignore half of the stats and just focus on killing things as fast as possible. the decision to give the game that sort of analog pc style feels a little more carefully considered to me than it often does in other games, obviously it makes doing the graphics much easier but it also lends the game a degree of warmth and close proximity often associated with early home computing and analog media in general (vinyl nerds have a point...)

all of these little points i've just mentioned (the obvious inspirations, the very classic linear structure, the overwhelming text, the visual style) all serve to reinforce that aforementioned feeling of love and pride which i sense coming from the developer through his internet lines underneath the ocean and around the fish and coral and up onto the shore into my computer and my eyes and thus into my brain and heart. as individual choices you could argue that a lot of these traits make the game a bit derivative or simplistic, and i wouldn't fully disagree, but it tells me that it's designed by someone who wanted to make a roguelike that he would like to play a lot of, and because of that i had a pleasant time playing a lot of it myself. this is actually the first game i've ever 100%'d on steam! this isn't a perfect game by any means (hence the 3.5 score), but it is a very sweet game.

i first played cultic about a year ago and i wasn't super impressed - the presentation was good, but it felt way too derivative of blood (something many, if not most of these throwback shooters are guilty of towards their respective inspirations) and mechanically rough around the edges - but recently i've sat down with it again and found myself hooked. it feels very well Crafted (with a capital c) compared to most of these games; there's a real striking visual style (lots of burnt out greys and browns, deep fall colors and collapsing brick and wood buildings) and every level feels like it was designed as a lived-in space. your path through each map is generally pretty linear but you're able to utilize the environment for cover and additional weaponry in a lot of fun and dynamic ways that keep each playthrough (i'm probably on my 4th or 5th now) feeling very fresh.

as i mentioned earlier, blood is the obvious big mechanical inspiration here, but the developer also namedrops re4 (which seems very obvious in retrospect) and i felt like i noticed a lot of far cry 1 in the level design or at least something adjacent. the dev also describes the visual style as 'crunchy' repeatedly on his twitter and that seems very apt, in a way it captures that shot-on-video grimy 80s slasher look that indie horror devs seem to love so much nowadays without resorting to straight up layering tape distortion over the camera as many of those same devs do. get more creative!!!! this whole game was made by one damn guy

very Functionally Fun although lacking in the basic polish or mechanical depth* that gives the best action roguelikes longevity. you play as some kind of cyberpunk-y... contract agent? shadowrunner? who gets sent into this big underground labyrinth managed by Titans, all of whom represent figures from greek mythology translated into the internet-era. i think this is all supposed to be a riff on the sort of 'gods' of our modern day lives, so theres like a God of Tiktok or a God of Playing Racing Games that you have to fight against at various points... the theming comes off as goofy and shallow as it probably sounds here. i swear to god theres like, a youtube lets play god named Pewdiepie or something that i kept encountering

the actual gameplay elements are about as shallow as the set dressing - the game has a lot of different little loops and mechanics that i can only assume were meant to spice things up & add another layer of complexity to an otherwise pretty simple game (its a platformer + you shoot stuff), but you pretty quickly realize that most of them aren't particularly interesting and offer few benefits so you learn to pass them over. the few mechanics which are worth engaging in (maybe the wave-based arena rooms? or the little crystals you activate on each floor?) are goooood for your run but not really that cool or engaging otherwise, ive probably retained like 0.2% of what this games presented me.

i hope the above two paragraphs werent so negative as to entirely turn you off of the game because it is actually pretty fun!! turns out its very hard to fuck up the simple run & gun formula. my brain still feels very satisfied with picking up little coins and killing enemies and shooting bullets on a primal level, its hard for some dumb theming & superfluous mechanics to spoil that. i will go ahead and add a caveat which is that sometimes (probably pretty rarely but still!!!) i will get hit by some absolute nonsense attack that appears out of nowhere and is virtually impossible to dodge which feels like a pretty damning fuck-up for a game like this, but for the most part i was able to put up with it. i ended up putting like, 15-20 hours into this game over the past few weeks and i'll probably continue with it for a little longer. sometimes you just need a simple imperfect game that clicks on a basic level but doesn't offer much more

i know mdickie games are supposed to be fucked up but damn you literally cannot do anything in this game lol. its very funny to see my character Porchswing Bennett (5 years old, 3'11, 200 lb) punch one guy and then immediately get tossed around by eighty other dudes in wrestler outfits while a thousand tutorial dialog boxes pop up and phones ring and sirens blare and the camera starts floating off screen until my guy dies but none of this requires me to actually press the keyboard, and because of that i got kind of bored and stopped playing very quickly. theres a certain balance between jankiness and actual engagement that old school just baaarely doesnt maintain; i think if they update the game a few times itll probably be more fun though

the latest in a long line of sandbox splat-em-ups designed to appeal directly to the 7th graders frontal cortex - see interactive buddy, mutilate a doll, etc. paint the town red differs in that its 1. obviously 3d, where the 2. sandbox elements are more in the vein of level creation and posting on the steam workshop than simply tinkering around, and 3. with aspirations of being a full-fledged roguelike. that last bit is where most of the replay value comes from, the 'beneath' mode where you run around in little caves and grottos smashing up dudes. it's very physically satisfying and appealing on a very visceral violent level (hence why middle schoolers would love it), but the roguelike elements are about as barebones as possible. it serves more as a justification for the admittedly fun gore physics to exist than actually making an interestingly designed game. still very fun though

stands above a lot of its trend hopping peers by virtue of its very cute and charming halloween world, and also because it requires a degree of active focus that leaves games like 20 minutes til dawn, brotato, halls of torment etc. feeling a touch lacking. i think most of these recent vampire-survivor-likes have already figured out that giving the player control of the attacking makes for more decision making makes for more engagement in simple roguelikes like this, but boneraiser flips it a little - your firepower doesn't even emanate from yourself, you're just a very fragile target floating around while your minions do all the work. as such you take a lot of damage, even minor grazes from enemies can nearly halve your health and larger waves can create a lot of instant game over scenarios.

this difficulty curve was initially a bit frustrating but i ended up putting like 30 hours into the game, which is way more than i can say for most of those aforementioned peers so clearly its good at making me invested. boneraiser minions is the first caiysware game i've actually sat down and played, but i've been familiar with the guys style for awhile and i really appreciate his taste in little pixel art ghouls & ghosts and in garish neon color palettes. at this point i'm pretty sick of the 8-16 bit era throwback style when its used solely as a callback (shovel knight and its consequences on the human race) but caiysware has a good spin on it. much recommended

hits that perfect spot between extremely low entry barrier and extremely high potential for nonsense that characterizes most of histories greatest online shoot em ups (quake, tf2, battlefield) - it costs 15 bucks, the servers work, and you can blow everything up. its fascinating how well battlebit creates a sense of War, or at least the cinematic idea of it that most of us sheltered dorks have accepted as reality (hundreds of dudes storming a beach, explosions everywhere, bodies flying). with ~250 player servers things get very heavy very quickly, everybody is screaming over their mics all at once including the dead guys, bullets are whizzing past you, a helicopter just got its tail rotor blown out and the dudes inside are yelling MAYDAY MAYDAY!!! at the top of their lungs while youre screen fills with lens flare and dense particulate. because of these things, the emerging community tends to take itself overly seriously and really get into character, barking out commands and groaning in agony when their little roblox dude gets sniped. just wonderful

certainly one of the best recent experiences ive had with an online shooter and i hope it holds onto this stuff for the foreseeable future. i'll end by sharing the same memory as a billion other reviews which is that it really does bring you back to playing battlefield 2 on your parents yellowed crt monitor in the computer room way past your bedtime. please add the nighttime airport map from the special forces dlc btw

note: i wrote a review for this game in early 2023 which i've since expanded & revised below for the december 2023 full release

great fundamentals (it feels good to shoot guys, i like cowboys) but extremely shaky in the finer details (everything else). at its core theres a great game here; i love slinking around the rotting desertscape and stepping on meaty viscous carrion and blowing grub men's heads up with my big rifle, but the interstitial bits dont facilitate those things very well. fundamentally the guns feel good and shoot better; cowboy weapons are always a treat because the slow reload times and low magazine sizes demand a lot of patience and careful consideration and so combat encounters become a game of stealth and precision rather than just jumping around spraying bullets everywhere (which i'm shitty at!). the three maps available in the full campaign are packed with bits of gear and special guns but feel very cold towards the player, since you can't really interact with any of the objects laying around and there's scary monsters that bite you everywhere. my initial playthrough of the game months ago had me really annoyed with all the backtracking needed to get around the map but further updates have mitigated that a little bit with some handy teleporation items. the problem though is that in theory this could be a rich wild west hell world but in practice it almost plays like a roguelike - you run to a location you haven't explored, run around cover picking up random bullets and bandages and shooting zombies in the head (you have to land head shots, every enemy takes about 20000 body shots to kill), and then you get low on resources and teleport back home to sell the loot and start over. it's somewhat fun at first but it gets old pretty fast!

a lot of this may just be my shitty video game abilities clashing with an intentionally hostile world, which would make sense - this is a setting warped by evil undead monsters, there's eldritch blood magic or something, i dunno but you would expect it to be very harsh towards human survival. where the game lost me is in trying to pull an actual narrative out of any of this. the basic story (i think) is that you're a dead gunslinger revived by native american ghosts? to purge the land of cursed artifacts which have allowed evil flying skulls and wendigos to kill everyone... yeah obviously this is pretty dumb. i don't know if the native american elements are even horribly offensive beyond being cliched, but they seem to be included as a flimsy justification for the fantastical story elements and if you're not gonna put the effort in to do a decent portrayal then you're just asking for some scrutiny, like come on. most of the lore comes via little notes scattered around the map that take up inventory space and aren't particularly interesting and i ended up just immediately selling them off without reading after going thru about twenty or so. i don't mean to be entirely negative though because i do like the general tone and a lot of the creature designs!! there clearly is a lot of heart here but it feels like some of the narrative and theming are simply there so that the gameplay elements (which are fun to be clear, if repetitive) have a reason to exist. i've had a hard time getting into this one in the past but with the full release it's warmed on me a little, so even if i never play this one again i'll probably still check out whatever the developers make next.

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

i feel like hrot really hits the platonic ideal of the 'Boomer Shooter Throwback' which has become so popular in indie game circles during the past few years. its really a very Simple game compared to its peers, it cuts back on a lot of the more flashy cinematic bits & direct callbacks to older shooters (see: new blood interactive) and tighten up the shooting & level design (see: shit like project warlock) to much success. what i enjoy about it more than anything are how important the little interactive details are to the developer - you look at his twitter feed and hes barely showing off the weapons and enemies and combat, its all just videos of an astronomical clock simulator he programmed in or a model railroad set that you can make drive around, it's a cute game. the world of post-monster-invasion czechoslovakia is inhuman at its core, groaning and spilling steam and oil from the grounds pores, all clattering pipes and dark brick corridors with rusty grate flooring or putrid water (silent hill esque?). none of the enemies have visible faces or entirely human body shapes, theyre all a little stretched out and bloated and they love to puke all over themselves. even the ceiling turrents make a sickly moan when you kill them (definitely silent hill)

and so, when combined, these two things (the careful extraneous details & the generally diseased atmosphere) intermingle and make you feel like the only two characters are yourself (as the player) and the world; the industrial parks and sewage tunnels all creak and shudder like a big big gross animal and the levels are designed in such a way as to loop around on themselves very well so you really do picture each one as a singular Thing rather than the discrete vignettes a lot of these type of games operate in (see: new blood interactive once again). i think the developer wants you to feel sad at seeing what this place has become post invasion and humanizes it to do that but i dont know much about the history of the czech republic or anything so thats where my train of thought ends.for me personally, the gunplay is kind of secondary to everything i just mentioned but its very satisfying, they use a straightforward reasonably varied pool of weapons and it all looks and feels good. i love to shoot guys, its just that simple

there's two big points i want to make off the bat about combat, which i feel is generally snubbed in discussions of historically important atari games -

1. combat was born into a world where pong was the dominant form of Electronic Television Game. but take your pong ball, snatched from the gentlemans sport of choice, and try blasting it through the barrel of a tank or a biplane's gunner and see if that doesn't shake things up. the combat here is obviously meant to be horrific warfare but the early limitations of programming for the 2600 (mainly in terms of visual & auditory presentation) leave your tanks feeling more like little creatures, squealing and groaning and spinning violently when hit. at the time this all must have been very unnerving

2. video game consoles used to for family entertainment and not for you lonely saps. i can't deny that the game being two-player only makes it a bit difficult to work with in 2023 but why judge it by those standards when its perfectly novel and sick within its own context. one can only imagine how thrilling it must have been to unwrap your brand new sleek wood-grain gaming rig in 1977 with the most gnarly looking launch title you'd ever seen up to that point. no more sticky plastic overlays of state capitols that peel off the tv screen for me mom, im going to WAR

another point worth mentioning is that you're not just getting one game here, you're getting a whopping 27. of course these are just different variations on the tank and biplane game modes but theres a lot of nuance to be found in there. the wall-bounce modes and the invisible tank mode are probably the most popular for good reason, both being very simple but novel twists on the base formula. we dont even have invisible tanks yet in real life

so overall i think combat is an understandably frustrating but still very worthwhile game that i very much appreciate knowing its place in history. the guys who made this were beating their heads against the wall trying to figure out how the fuck to make those dudes on your screen drive around and shoot each other, be grateful. its the 2600 launch title for gods sake...

we went to the Pinball Hall of Fame and i got to drink baja blast and ride around on this one, so overall i would say my experience with top skater was Sweet and Refreshing. the controls seem notoriously and in person-ly...? shitty but i was a little fried and a billion small children had probably already thrown themselves against the machine in the time it took me to discover its presence. let top skater reveal its mysteries to you, unfurling like smoke across the arcade floor, an orange glow beckoning you.... find yourself wobbling around gripping the bars while your dude violently throws himself into walls and falls off his board. the Unusual Locomotion Style Arcade Game is a very delightfully enchanting game, no doubt.

i'm hesitantly calling this one my favorite current online shooter, although i have a lot of reservations that come and go as the game itself changes. i've been playing for about a year and a half now which much less than many of you, so keep that in mind. also, because of how often fortnite changes, my review might reference a few gameplay elements which're outdated by the time you're reading it. additionally, most of my gameplay is in the 'no build' mode, so i'm not gonna mention the building aspect of the game despite how important that was (and still is, to an extent).

fortnite takes some of my favorite aspects of other successful online shooters - the 100 man battle royale format, the wide open hunger games style map and looting, and layers upon that simple but satisfying gunplay and gadgetry. the core loop of fortnite involves parachuting onto the map, landing in an appropriate location, finding your first weapon, and then it morphs into a different sort of loop, where the rest of the match involves slowly scouring the map for more loot while edging inwards to avoid the encroaching Storm. most of the combat feels situational, compared to games that're more map-oriented like counterstrike or overwatch. you can learn the map, but specific geographical features rarely factor into my thought process while fighting opponents. rather, you're free to approach any given situation from a number of angles and consider tons of different factors - how to position yourself, what gun to use when, how you can apply your special weapons and grenades (such as a katana with a dash attack, or a throwable shield) to best gain an edge. fights are very fast-paced and frantic, it can be overwhelming at times but once you get into a groove it starts activating some sort of primal guerilla warfare minded portion of my brain and it clicks verrry well.

updates are very frequent in fortnite, coming every few months or so and bringing entirely new weapons, items, vehicles, locations, a lot of shit. the beauty of fortnite is that it's decided it can have it all, you can play it like a serious competitive FPS game or a kid friendly party game (notice how they never use the word 'kill' in the game itself), it can explore different types of movement and combat and different paces however it wants, cuz in a few months it'll all be different anyways. you see that philosophy a lot in the marketing and cross-promotions too, they basically just add whatever the fuck pop cultural figure or cartoon character they can get the rights to, and i think as a result of both of these things it's like, the biggest game in the world. not since pokemon have i been able to walk up to my 10 year old cousin, my 20 year old neighbor, and my 40 year old uncle and talk to all of them about the same game. funny games bring us together

this is an off-the-dome rambly style review so i'll unfortunately be ending it on a negative note cuz that's what came to mind last. i think the biggest flaw in fortnite's core gameplay is that it's soooo loot dependent. i've noticed through watching my own games & the gameplay of others that a really large portion of losses come down to a simple difference in equipment complimented by slightly bad positioning. if you get into an encounter with an opponent who's using significantly higher quality weapons than you (i shouldve mentioned that weapons have degrees of quality associated with various colors, you know how video game loot work i guess) you're boned like, 75% of the time, even if your aim is ok and you get the jump on them first. this is especially bad with certain weapons, like this current season's (chapter 4 season 2) cobra dmr, which can absolutely shred opponents at the higher qualities using its really high fire rate & long range, really annoying. this could probably be remedied a lot just by making rare weapons more rare, i've noticed that you can also get a lot of these weapons within seconds of landing which is absurd. again though, because fortnite changes so much, stuff like that never feels like a big deal for long. you just hit Ready and drop in again

i will add to the end of this that fortnite as a company (and much of the monetization and core parts of the game itself, really) is clearly trying to manipulate children out of their parents money, but to be honest i'm sitting here half asleep & stoned at like 4 pm on a tuesday afternoon and i have nothing to say about it. dont spend money on the game i guess