80s/early 90s anime is one of my favorite things, so a game trying to capture that look, combined with old-school shooter action, immediately caught my interest. Unfortunate, then, that it only half-commits to that aesthetic, while also being yet another Procedurally Generated Roguelike Slop-fest.

In Mullet Mad Jack, you run through floor after floor of the same rooms over and over, occasionally punctuated by a boss fight, while listening to some of the worst humor since High on Life. Do you like references? We've got Demolition Man, we've got Bane-posting, we've got RE4 Merchant lines that I forgot to screencap and I don't want to re-install the game!

The core concept is that you have 10 seconds to live, and killing enemies adds to your timer. This is because you're on a livestream and dopamine etc etc yadda yadda The Horrors of Capitalism because it's 2024 and everyone thinks they're fuckin Paul Verhoeven now by stomping this already well-trod ground into De Planet Corrrrre.

The time limit, however, means you have to always be moving forward. This also means the level "design", such as it is, can't be too complex. It's really just a series of hallways, some bigger than others, and they didn't even bother to make very many of them. You'll see the same very distinct rooms countless times, often several floors in a row. This, combined with how easy the game is on Normal (the Easy difficulty is named "I want a boomer shooter," as some weird dig at boomer shooters... But this game was easier than any boomer shooter I think I've ever played) mean you're just mindlessly blasting and holding Forward. Lasers are the most intimidating obstacle in the game, because they do a ton of damage, but you can also get an upgrade that halves that.

About the upgrades: You can pick from 3 every floor, and after 10 floors they reset except for your weapon (the weapons also appear in the upgrade screen). Just always make sure you get the shotgun, +max time, and increased chances for ricochets and enemies exploding. Those are really all you need, and you can cruise through. I never used any of the other weapons.

After yawning my way through 80 floors, I was surprised when the game just... Ended. I had assumed it would be 100, but I can't say I was sad that I wouldn't have to trudge through 20 more floors of rooms that I had already seen approximately 65 times so far. Then, to end things on a really great note, you have a final boss fight where your health is represented by a "badass-o-meter" and the last line is the same joke as the end of the Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks Dragnet movie.

2/10 - One grace point because sometimes there's stuff in here that looks pretty neat, even though other times it looks like art from a spinoff Meet N Fuck game.

PS: If you want something similar to this (as in, the game Mullet Mad Jack ripped off wholesale), I recommend checking out Post Void, which is 3 dollars at full price and also looks way cooler.

I stumbled across Asmodev's Steam page a couple of months ago, and thought their games looked... Unique. During a sale, a bundle of most of their games was like 5 dollars, so I took the plunge. I do love supporting indie developers, and let me tell you, it don't get much more indie than this!

Infernal Radiation, Asmodev's first game, is an action-bullet hell-rhythm-RPG, where you go around exorcising demons via two-button combat. You can attack and block, with a cooldown, and timing this so you block the enemy's projectiles and counter-attack is the name of the game. Of course, if you hit either of them before you're supposed to, it makes an Atari noise and locks you out of an action for a brief period, to keep you from button mashing.

These fights are pretty entertaining once you get the hang of it, but the RPG elements cause a problem here: rather than being tuned for a specific rhythm, being able to put points in cooldown reduction, attack power, etc makes things sloppy, like your block running out before the enemy's salvo of projectiles has actually completed, meaning you need to block again, and then you might not have time to attack before their next attack starts. Or, if you aren't putting any points into reducing their speed, you simply will never have time to attack at all. Once defeated, enemies are gone, so you can't grind them for XP, though you do get XP for each attack landed, and you keep it after a death. So you can continue banging your head against a boss to get some progress, but there's no respec function so it's very possible to completely fuck yourself over with bad skill point allocation.

There are quite a few strange decisions like that. You can get holy water of various types, which can reduce the enemy's mana, make your attacks cause more damage, or poison them. You want the poison one. That's the only one worth using, because it gives you free damage and bypasses the enemy's shields (sometimes they can only be damaged once you have a certain combo level, and poison ignores that).

There are also incenses and prayers you can buy. Incenses, though seeming like consumables, are actually permanent buffs. There is only one vendor who sells the best incenses, near the end of the game, and so once you get to the last boss and have money for them, you'll have to walk back to her. Not a long trek, but a weird decision.

Prayers activate certain effects when their words have been spoken during battle. As far as I can tell, this is random. Both incenses and prayers can be sold back for the same amount you paid for them, so you can experiment freely. This makes it even weirder that you can't respec skill points.

The story is... Interesting. You're on an island where a nuclear generator blew up, and that radiation has apparently empowered the forces of satan to possess everybody on the island. You eventually discover the source of the explosion, which is maybe the single most bizarre part of the game (and that's saying something), but at the end I'm not sure what most of this was actually about. The dialogue consisting entirely of broken English didn't help, but you can still get the gist of what people are saying.

Infernal Radiation took me about 2 hours to beat, and it can often be had for One Doler on sale. You can do a lot worse. It intrigued me enough to continue my journey through the Asmodev Gameography.

5/10

After enjoying my time with Outcast 2, I decided to give the first game another shot, as I never finished it when I tried it several years ago.

There's something I want to make clear right off the bat: despite being referred to as a remake, Second Contact is really a remaster, while the Outcast 1.1 "remaster" was really just a port playable on modern systems. Second Contact features a (quite nice!) new coat of paint, but underneath it, this is still the same game, with a couple of minor improvements. The audio is the same, obvious from its heavy compression and use of stock sound effects (enemies make That Aargh Sound when they get shot), movement and targeting is clunky, and sometimes the increased draw distance can let you see things that you weren't meant to see.

Looking at Outcast from a modern perspective, however, there's a lot to admire. It's more of an adventure game than an action game at its heart, as most of NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE's time is spent talking to the native aliens and solving their problems, in an effort to free them from the tyrannical rule of the evil Fae Rhan. Rather than having objectives marked on the map, you operate based on landmarks and asking the locals for directions. This seems like it would be tedious, but the areas aren't nearly as large as they seem. Except for traveling between areas, as some of the portal placements are... Suspect. The worst one is how there's only one way to get to Okaar, and it involves going to a different area first, and then slowly swimming your ass over to an island with the portal. And you have to get back the same way.

Your main objective, apart from collecting the Plot Devices to get back to Earth, is convincing the locals to stop supplying Fae Rhan's soldiers with food, money, and weapons, thus weakening them when you have to fight them. The combat is, to put it lightly, total ass, and not difficult at all. The hardest thing is not running out of ammo, as the enemies are massive bullet sponges until you weaken them later. On the bright side, the vast majority of enemies do not respawn when killed, but this also means that by the time you've done all the work to cripple their efficacy... They're pretty much all dead. This weakening, by the way, apparently does not apply to the enemies in the final fight. Before this fight, your weapons have been removed, along with all of your ammo. Before this showdown, you are given your weapons back along with an amount of ammo apparently determined by how many sidequests you've done. With around 75% of them finished, I got, uhhh, like 60 bullets for the machine gun and maybe 10 shots for my laser rifle. Cool. Thankfully, the boss seems to have the same one-shot weakness to the flamethrower that the regular enemies have.

Other than the combat, the main issue is that a few of the puzzles are insanely obtuse. This isn't unique to Outcast, and if anything only proves that it's really a point-and-click adventure game with some combat bolted on. The organ puzzle would not be out of place in a King's Quest game, and the temple puzzle early on is a great example of pre-Gamefaqs games just straight-up telling you the wrong thing to do, because they gotta sell strategy guides and/or keep people from beating them in one weekend. Sometimes key objects are also very difficult to see, which can be worse due to the increased environmental density in Second Contact. The aforementioned organ puzzle is a prime example of that, where the pipe near the dragon-thing was damn near invisible. Items you can pick up are sometimes highlighted by the HUD, but sometimes they aren't. Oh well!

Despite these issues, Outcast interested me enough to see it through to the end. There was a lot of ambition here, and while it doesn't really come together, especially when played in The Year of Our Gorb 2024, I can appreciate what they were trying to do. My feelings on this game are almost a complete mirror of my thoughts on the second: The dialogue is actually much better than the sequel, with Slade being way more of a smarmy asshole, while the sequel's combat is miles better than the first's. The sequel does not have the pixel hunt puzzles of the first, but it has more generic quests in general. Maybe Outcast 3, if it ever gets made, will hit the perfect middle ground.

6/10