Recent reviews by EIKO

One of the freshest and most atmospheric games I've played in a long time. So good you forget it's still Early Access.

Best Sonic since Adventure 2. Easily. It feels like the Sonic Team that is convinced they're making the coolest ♥♥♥♥ ever has returned.

No spoilers here.

To quickly put it in perspective, about 16 hours in, I ran into a section in a level that made me wait for a platform, and impatiently waiting for mere seconds made me realize how actively engaged I am the other 99% of the time. The game really knows its strengths, and wants you to just get out there and go for it. Where previous Sonic games have had a tendency to fall into being overly automated, this one has figured out how to give you a spectacle that you earn, by filling maps chock full with rails, springs, boost pads, wall runs, and so on, all of which require your responsiveness. The platforming in this game is FAST. The best cameras in video games are ones you don't notice, and I will say Frontiers' camera is generally phenomenal. It knows where the action is, and you always have plenty of time to react to what's coming, so you don't need to fiddle with the cameras or stop moving. The game really does not care HOW you progress, and will give you items you need as long as you just keep zipping around the islands. And if you feel exhausted with all that, the fishing minigame allows you to take a breather and still progress that way. When I said the game doesn't care how you progress, I mean it. Sonic Team made a great open world and wanted the players to have the freedom to smash into whatever enemies and run or jump up, down, across, or into whatever they want. And if you keep playing and keep upgrading your stats, you just get faster, and faster, and faster. Top speed in this game feels hilariously fast and rewarding. Easily the most fun I've had playing a game in years.

The game is so addicting, I have been completely and blissfully ignoring the flaws in the presentation of the game. Yet, I would feel dishonest if I didn't write them in this review. To list them, and why I didn't find them to be deal breakers:

- Pop-in is very-much present, remarks on this front are genuine. However, you're going to be racing around from point A to point B so much, you'll hardly notice it since you'll be weaving around obstacles and reacting to what's directly in front of you a very good portion of the time.

- Cyberspace levels do not control 1:1 with how the controls in the open world do. The levels even seem to control slightly different from one another. This is a bizarre choice, perhaps ties into other design motifs in the game, but this issue is generally not as jarring as you might expect unless you're trying to make a particularly tricky jump.

- Excessive re-use of cutscenes. Every time you enter a portal, leave a portal, fast travel to a portal, activate a story segment, collect a chaos emerald, a small cutscene will play. This is the nitpickiest of nitpicks, since you're able to skip these cutscenes, but they are definitely repetitive, and only feel worse than they are due to how fast the game is the rest of the time.

- Cyberspace levels only have 4 themes. This is a big disappointment for some folks, especially given there are a good handful of levels per island, meaning you'll be looking at the same backdrops from the start to the end of the game. And, they are themes that Sonic Team has been reusing repeatedly for about a decade now. However the levels are generally really well-designed, and the joy in them comes from their bite-sized length that makes it fun to try and blitz through as fast as possible to make the S rank time. Their memorability suffers from the fact that they all share themes, and they don't have names.

At the time, these are the main issues I have with the game. All I can say at this point is that I'm extremely excited for Sonic's future titles, and feel that if SEGA is ready to commit to giving Sonic Team more freedom over what they make (considering development time, budget, resources), we may be at the doorstep of another golden age for Sonic.

These shoes made my video game hedgehog better. Too bad they're made of soap...

I genuinely don't like the broad majority of FPS games, and this has had me hooked since I downloaded it a week ago. Incredibly addictive, can't wait to see what else gets added in the long term. Overall, very good arena shooter. Seems super optimized, developers definitely know what they're doing. The few bugs I have run into have been generally inconsequential. Extremely fun with friends if you wanna just giggle about bad driving skills while enraged gamers shoot at you.

Easily the best early access game I've ever bought. This game is chock full of replay value. Even if you've completed the main story, there's loads of game modifiers to try out, and since each level is procedurally generated, it can still keep you guessing about whether there's a load of bad guys around the next corner, and whether you have enough ammo in the gun you just picked up to take them out. I always forget this game is unfinished, and I am absolutely thrilled to have supported this developer. There's no nonsense here, just pure gameplay and fun, and the trello board is giving me tons of excitement for the future of the game. Incredible dev, incredible game, and incredible potential.

I have the Living Legend achievement so please clap.

Cute and fun little game, emphasis on little though. Would love to see a LEGO digital designer done in this engine. It's a really short game, purchase if you have some spare money to blow, and like to be charmed by little LEGO dudes. Do not purchase if you don't feel like spending $20 on a <3 hour game.

I want to start off saying that in a vaccuum, this game is an extremely good roguelike. I have had a lot of fun playing this game, and if that is all you care about, buy this game. However, this game has a gruesome and horrible underbelly: the community and its management, and the longevity of the game will suffer horribly for it.

Simply put, the community management is not running a Caves of Qud community -- they are running a virtue signalling contest where everyone is a bash-the-fash-obsessed LGBTQASDFEIEIO+ representative, and if you don't fit the bill, you are extremely likely to be banned from all outlets of discussion. And that's not an exaggeration. We're talking about a game where you can hack off an innocent civilian's face and eat it, but if you request to be able to join the game's villains, you will be excommunicated from the Discord or Reddit servers, and you will be labeled a fascist. In participating on the Discord server, you will be made to adhere to everyone's custom gender pronouns under the threat of being banned or perma-muted, and the community management seriously (and I mean seriously) considered completely disallowing men from the Discord server. Before allowing you to even read anything in the server, you need to submit an application, upon which they will invade your privacy and check your social media accounts if you have any to look at, and if they deem you unfit by unknowable metrics, they will ban you from not only the Discord server, but the subreddit as well. I say this from experience.

Because of these things, it is literally impossible to report bugs (EDIT: there is a public bug tracker through bitbucket), impossible to make suggestions, impossible to get assistance in modding this game as a creator, and almost entirely impossible to find other people who like to discuss the game. The game's community is fractured and scattered into compartmentalized servers across Discord. The official community will judge you and call you a bigot without knowing you, and any attempt to assert a notion otherwise will be met with unforgiving force by an echo-chamber of unrelenting bootlickers.

The community management does not seem to want to run a server about Caves of Qud. They want to run safe space hugbox where the only people who are welcome to participate are people who adhere strongly to their personal politics. Because of this, or until it changes, I believe the longevity of this game is extremely limited, and does not foster an environment where creative minds can make the best of the engine to improve upon the game with modded content. The community management is actively fighting away whatever exposure the game gets, and I believe will suffer immensely from cutting off the nose to spite the face.

Pretty much exactly what you see on the store page! If you think you'll enjoy it, you'll almost certainly enjoy it.