Recent reviews by Powerman 9000

Luv me Donnie
Luv me Yi Sang
Luv me 'Saulty
Luv me Greg

'ate Mirror Dungeon
'ate Red Coins
'ate Faust (Not serious, but she keeps showing up in all my rolls)

Simple As

If you can get past the jank tutorial and the amount of overwhelming infodumping at first it's an oddly stylish if extraordinarily bleak Urban Fantasy Cyberpunk game (While still being more comprehensible lorewise than Shadowrun). I still have no clue how the damage values work but the important part is I stopped just Win-Rating everything.

I'm gonna be honest while there are a lot of really neat things going for this game, I can't quite recommend it largely because of how atrocious the save system is.

First the positives:
As just about anyone will tell you Jesper Kyd gave some abnormally hard tracks for the game. There was never a track that didn't have me at least lightly bobbing my head, and not once did it fail to help elevate a scene.

The biggest appeal for me was that you could basically round up a huge posse with some basic squad commands to handle every situation. When the game's shining I basically have a whole platoon walking single-file firing every single weapon at once at several schmucks at once and I basically hang back to clean up strays.

Also I dig the gradual character design change, the main characters starts looking like Chris Redfield, then Jack from The Last Stand then The Prince for some reason at the end, same goes for the NPCs and recruitable fighters changing with the seasons too.

General style and design still looks fairly decent, and the night scenes with the snow effects look nice and moody when the action is quiet.

Moving on to the problems I have.

The checkpoints are extremely sparse and manually saving is a pain in the ass involving going back to sewer drains each time, which means you'll have to finish some longer levels in one long sprint if you're unlucky, especially if you play Hard Mode. Honestly the gunplay just isn't very good in this. There's a lot of enemies clipping shots through every wall possible, ammo is sparse for just about everything, and almost all the guns feel like useless peashooters with wild hitboxes.

While the large number of recruitable fighters is great, it gets offset by the fact that the AI is woefully braindead quite a lot of the time, and while the single-file murder train is funny the first few times it also does not help when it comes to spacing. One rogue enemy NPC that decided it really loves throwing grenades at a random point in time for that specific run will space a crowd immediately. Not being able to fix up their loadouts or individually issue commands also gets really agitating. They also just aren't very durable at all before requiring your direct help.

The mission design being slightly non-linear is kind of neat at first but there's only one really "correct" order to do everything, with anything else being time wasting at best. Especially when the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Attack Helicopters are involved, which is complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that you can unload an entire turret into them and they just...don't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ die or leave.

I'm not too chuffed on commenting on the story, it's a simple enough and does its job even if some things come out of nowhere.

I didn't remember when the hell the comic relief guy in the hat was introduced or what his name was even once. I also don't remember when the lady main character ever said she had a thing for you like the end was going towards. Then there's just some moments going by weirdly quick, like the moment with the protagonist's brother and the Russian General guy. Not really complaints from me but between the artstyle, presentation and the OST it was at least nicely presented.

Overall I can't really recommend Freedom Fighters unless you wanna just blitz through it on one of the lower difficulties just to get the vibe it has, I certainly ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ recommend it over Homefront as far as U.S. Invasion games go but otherwise short of just wanting to see what the fuss is about there's nothing you wouldn't miss seeing a review.

If IO gets to do a sequel one day though it'd be cool, and I wouldn't mind seeing how much they've improved.

A nice and simple Isometric exploring game with a VERY hefty shotgun included. The controls are simple enough to get used to and enjoy, coupled with the aforementioned feedback from the Shotgun there's some very nice gameplay moments with the length of the game and the enemy selection.

The art style is a nice mix of cute with some creepy with a very earnest tone that keeps things lighthearted and adventurous. On top of all this is the very nice music selection which I was surprised by how fitting and entertaining the tracks were!

Also if you played the demo then your save game carries over perfectly as well.

All in all a very fun short game at a very cheap price that I would recommend to just about anybody!

An extremely underexposed game that fills an inFAMOUS and Saints Row shaped hole in my heart.

At the time it came out it was a very nice variation to what was ostensibly a very grey-green-brown lineup for the Xbone's launch that mostly got one dig at AC Unity before not getting much coverage at all. Not helping is the game being portrayed by most as more of a Borderlands humor type game with the usual kinds of cringe most would expect.

Some of the cringe is there but this is far more of an Insomniac Bing Bing Wahoo game than it could ever be considered a lulrandom cringe time. While I didn't laugh that much the game kept me consistently upbeat and there were rare moments that I'd ever be genuinely aggravated or bored out of my mind. And for a game that can take around 30+ hours to 100% that's a good time to me. The soundtrack's punk oriented tunes also help quite a bit.

The gameplay is a very smooth parkoury cartoon-ish ride that involves a lot of wall-running, grinding, leaping and bouncing which serves the Combo system which serves a system of powerups called Amps which serve your weapons with said powerups to more and more extreme degrees which can help combat significantly. While there are standard issue weapons that are still really fun to use like the Dirty Harry and the AK (Word to the wise the AK-FU sucks and isn't worth waiting to get it free halfway through the game, AK-FOFF is superb, there's a wide variety of whackier Insomniac weapons to go with it. A lot of this feels like a very direct response to how dull EA forced them to make Fuze, so here you get things like a Blunderbuss that looks like it has cojones, a hairspray can launcher that explodes into more explosions of hairspray cans and a literal grenade launcher BFG out of Doom.

The character customization is slightly limited by a good amount of the clothes being very clingy (then again could be an upside for some :D) and your choices for body type being skinny girl, vavoom girl, average man and Kenshiro from Fist of The North Star. Not necessarily a bad lineup but for the latter the amount of skinny pants that make it look like you skip leg day is amusing. B
esides that though and the limited color palette selections? This is a very decently robust customization system with a full on layering setup for upper body and head that would make Saints Row 2 VERY proud. Otherwise sky is the limit for what you come up with and a lot of them look very cool. The only thing you can't do is properly wear a hoodie with a jacket on top because the hood then gets taken off in to a flat texture on your character's nape, which is funny but one small gripe. Also the face paint options are a bit lacking, so a slightly more built makeup system to get that type of Wes Borland, Jim Root, Joey Jordison or The Crow makeup setup can be made a bit less cumbersome.

A gripe with gameplay I will admit is that it can sometimes get repetitive by the time you're finishing out the game, though admittedly if you're like me and collecting like a madman it's normal to feel exhausted, following this another gripe is just a general Insomniac problem but so much of what's in the game is VERY expensive, which can discourage going for more and more different weapons a decent amount of time. I don't mind the Hairspray Gun, the Propane Launcher, the Pulse Cannon/BFG I think it was called or the Charge Beam being very expensive because those are VERY strong weapons. But most of the rest of these are NOT worth THAT much unless you have a very particular preference. Which in and of itself gets irritating because there's no New Game+ and replaying Missions is rather cumbersome, especially because a good amount of them you can't replay cutscenes very well, at least for me.

There's also just smaller optimization things like how you can't really make the game windowed because the resolution only changes the rendering resolution and the windowed/fullscreen is just borderless windowed vs dedicated fullscreen. The UI can get a bit bugged and sometimes you have to outright go all the way back to the main menu and back in to get some things like the challenge select and so on working again.

All that aside Sunset Overdrive is an absolute Recommend from me especially on Sale and I highly hope Insomniac can get around to making a sequel given they still own the ip.

Midnight Fight Express is a game I was very much looking forward to ever since the Demo came out a while's back. When it first came out I left by far the longest review I've ever written on Steam to the point that I had just found out that there's an actual Word Limit on this platform which was mildly enlightening for me to find out. My review was a non-recommendation short of going on sale as I felt at the time there were a lot of criticisms I had for the game that kept its best potential and fun from shining through. Ever since then the dev had gone to work patching through just about every single criticism I had line by line, which that alone I find extremely admirable and a commendation on their character which would give me grounds alone to recommend the game for the work being put in.

The game is a brutal isometric beat-em-up with a lot of influence from games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Sleeping Dogs and Hotline Miami. It is fairly challenging but also extremely satisfying to fight the whole way through in this game, especially as you get a better understanding of some mechanics, their usage and utility along with how to approach certain types of enemies. When the game initially came out this game was EXTREMELY rough starting from the 4th level onwards, and in a 40 mission game excluding the intro this was a mixed bag to get through after all that. Not helping things is that the upgrade system gated off certain abilities until a certain level was reached, and upgrade points would only be acquired from finishing levels for the first time. The game very quickly fell in to a habit of throwing waves of extremely durable enemies with short wind-ups and also always had at least one person with a gun who would have a very itchy trigger finger. This painted the encounters in a way that made them extremely frustrating and genuinely unfun at quite a lot of points as it felt like the worst aspects of Hotline Miami were beginning to rear themselves in what is ostensibly a 3d beat em up with health bars.

Since the patches, this has been toned down and in my opinion the enemies are now perfectly reasonable to deal with on Normal and Hard with Realistic basically being a challenge difficulty to begin with assuming you've gone through the former two at least once. The less useful abilities were buffed, you can pick your abilities from the trees to your content so long as you have the points and you can even turn some of them off entirely if they don't suit your playstyle. I would highly recommend for your first run that you play either Normal or Hard and don't worry about the challenges for that first big run, though they have also toned down some of the more aggravating/unreasonably difficult challenges in this case as well, so a majority of them would just be acquired during regular gameplay.

Moving on from just what's been patched and discussing the game prior, this game is absolute joy to play and has some amazing mocap work with executions, counters and combos that will stick with you for a while. Absolutely hats off to NoiseCream as well for the phenomenal soundtrack that helps keep the tension high and the action a treat to watch. While the customization system could use a couple of additions like hairstyles/beards and some more varied jackets/pants, it is still extremely fun to mix and match with along with the fact that you have the ability to play as any enemy or boss you've encountered throughout the game (Though for bosses you will likely have to finish at least 4/5 of the level's challenges).

The gameplay will include your standard Arkham/Sleeping Dogs punching/holding moves, grapples, prompted counters, executions, finishers and environmental finishers as well. The two additions to this that can be toggled off completely are a self-reloading Magnum that has not just a regular bullet loaded in but 5 other utility bullets once it is fully upgraded and a grappling whip that can be used for not just disarming, grabbing and swinging but also to trip up enemies with one yank. I can't thank the dev enough that if needed you can turn off the latter abilities and let you play it as a regular brawler, but they are still useful abilities if you make actual use of them to go with.

Some of the highlight levels of this game are The Restroom, The Airport, The Aeroplane, The Construction Site, The Elevator and The Lobby. These may not have as many hazards but these are such nice knockdown drag-out fights across entire maps that they're not only extremely fun to batter fools around in they're a visual treat. The exception mainly being The Airport which is one big homage to No Russian from Modern Warfare 2, being able to simply walk in an elevator and batter Makarov and his goons to death with your barehands is next level badass and funny. While this is also a gun heavy level, the gunplay is short and compact after the patch and now isn't as much of a constant hazard plaguing the level design, which makes this level and all the other more gun heavy levels all the better. Which works perfectly because the gunplay is just about any John Wick fan's personal fantasy, especially once you have executions, its quick, snappy and just as brutal.

I will say there are still a couple of levels that still make me a bit aggravated, The Fight Club in particular having by far one of the worst finales of on any level between the overly tanky bikers and bikes exploding at random, and The Graveyard full of zombies is still a bit of a pain to get through given how one and done their unblockable grapples can be. These are at least easy to get through if you're in a hurry and you only need to get challenges done once across all the difficulties if you really need to. However these are also few and far in between a lot of very entertainingly actiony levels to go with, and are still all the more palatable after the work the dev put in patching this game.

The game is very set piece heavy in order to keep the level to level fresh, which does help in its favor as you will be seeing an extremely wide amount of enemies and hazards coming for you. While the story is decent enough for what its trying to accomplish and I do look forward to seeing what happens next, the gimmicks is what can help break some level of monotony to things now. You won't just be fighting street thugs but cops, mimes, hooded cultists, special forces, leather clad subs, aformentioned Modern Warfare villains, pirates, zombies, priests and more. While these would have been overkill beforehand, the balancing is done in to make it decently enjoyable approaching the game your way and coming out with your hands bloody.

While this review is a bit shorter than my initial review, I see this is a result of the good of the game being so easy to recommend without being overtly exposition laden for things that the players looking to play this game would be able to figure out for themselves as well. I wholeheartedly endorse and recommend Midnight Fight Express as it is a labor of love from the dev and an extremely fun beat em up that I look forward to seeing what the dev does with it going from here!

Not bad at all for what's there so far. A few graphical hiccups and pop-in at a bad time, like at the end of Chapter 3 during the outro cutscene.

Also I'm not quite sure but with the newest update it's a bit harder to gauge the aim for a headshot, if aiming in general?

I look forward to seeing how it goes from here, especially if the dev will still be updating.

I can't praise The Last Stand games enough for being simple, but endearing and effective at what they do.

I played these games way back when I was a kid on something or other flash game website, maybe ArmorGames, AddictingGames, Kongregate, whichever it was it stuck for me hard. The first two games have just defending a barricade and its one of the most entertaining 20 to 45 minutes you'll ever have with that kind of premise. And honestly it still holds up extremely well to me, to the point that I played through both 1 and 2 multiple times for the sake of getting a kick.

Union City is a bit of a different beast. It's one of the more unique Side Scrolling RPGs I've seen, and it's decently sized enough that it guarantees at least a couple of hours before you get to the end, which in and of itself is a bit amazing to me. While I don't quite love Union City (barring an ending I really didn't particularly like) the same way I love 1 and 2, the game is fun yet again for builds and possible playthrough styles. While the gameplay loop can get a bit ridiculous at times especially when Rushes happen, it still has a punchy feeling when using the weapon you've spec'd in to (and I do encourage that if you have a weapon type in mind you STICK with it specifically, because double dipping in to multiple pools without maxing can get really hap hazard really quickly).

Even the story gets a gleeful feeling out of me, Jack as a protagonist doesn't need a lot to feel charming for such a short set of games, but his quips make it work really well, and the sheer amount of ways you can handle things in 2 with him gives a lot of entertaining stories to make out of it. I hope he and maybe the Union City Protagonist get mentioned in Aftermath at least.

However I do need to make note as CLEARLY AS I CAN
THERE ARE A LOT OF BUGS.

Barring the fact that the games start chugging after a bit when the zombie count starts ramping and I'm not sure if The Last Stand 1 has had the bug fixed where your character can also be lost while on a search party, there's a lot of issues with the UI in these games. There's lots of overlapping elements and random clicks that can faze through each other when you don't want them to.

This gets especially bad in Union City because pressing E by accident means for all you know you either opened a container on top of your inventory or you walked out a door by pure accident and now the game is fumbling between pausing and keeping things running.

The companions also have a really bad bug where they permanently lose any weapon you give them that they're holding when you hit the "next area" prompt. As in just entering the overworld map will cause you to lose that weapon completely. While you can avoid this by constantly remembering to switch your companion's weapon back to the default when you can, it still shouldn't have to be the case, and I think this particular bug needs the most immediate attention.

These are the bugs that I've encountered with all that I've played of the games but I do consider them worth addressing due to how inconvenient they can be for any playthrough.

Concluding this review, I absolutely love The Last Stand games and I'm glad I got to replay them to find out that I wasn't just posturing with nostalgia going back

-BUT-

While I do absolutely recommend these games I really would encourage the devs to iron out these bugs, otherwise it'll be a real sour time trying these for the first time or just going back.

Not a very bad game at all I'd say. A blend of DMC and CoD Parkour (or TitanFall if you'd prefer) that for the most part doesn't work too badly, especially when you start getting all of the upgrades and use up one move after the other.

A bit simple, and a bit janky though, but for 9 CAD and one dude working on it, plus a guaranteed follow up game for the whole price I'd say you could do FAR worse.

Adding cutscene skip is essential I'd say, also the reward for finding the treasures seems to be completely glitched for me as no matter how many times I start a new game and collect every treasure in one run it still seems to not want to give me the final achievement.

All around if you've got 9 bucks to spare and wanna kill a few hours I'd give it a go.

It's kay

I haven't encountered such a complex moral conundrum in gaming for such a long time.

What does one do when they are in a position to drop an anvil on a crudely modeled cat by literal Hood Rats?

Rats are the natural predator to cats, revenge is obvious, but the cat puts its hands together and mews for mercy. Staring longingly in to my soul, hoping it may live to see another day. Shall I truly inflict grotesque cartoony street justice upon a being that begs for its life? Am I seeking justice by annihilating a being that is only following its nature? And at that one that still places me as above it in the grand circle of life?

I come to this review board to show that my compassion begot the best of me, and I could not bare to go through with the tutorial.

To those that venture forth, further from my own dilemma, I leave you with this Loading Screen Tip from the last game that left me in such a crisis: "Do you feel like a hero yet?"