Recent reviews by Scifer

Negative review for this because Steam has no ‘Nyeeehh’ option and most people won’t read any more positive ones. I get the feeling that Below Zero is meant to be more of a ‘spin-off’ or ‘expanded DLC’ rather than a direct sequel, but I will be making a lot of comparisons to the original as I feel it is similar enough to use as a fair frame-of-reference. I LOVE the original Subnautica and I want to support the developer so they continue to make nice things, but Below Zero has a LOT of flaws, bugs and questionable design choices that just pushed it over the edge, for me.

The game looks and sounds great. Every underwater biome has its’ own look, feel and colour scheme that really help you tell every area apart. The arctic setting is utilized very effectively to create some beautiful setpieces as well as many of the perils an explorer would encounter within that environment. The first hour of gameplay was great. Swimming around discovering survival tech, scanning new creatures and daring myself to go deeper was the core of what made the original Subnautica great. However -

Due to the well-deserved success of Subnautica 1, it seems like the devs wanted to expand on what made the original good. There’s a TON more voice-actors, characters and extra lore which, while impressive, I feel is detrimental to the overall experience. Subnautica 1 has a sense of disquieting isolation to it. By contrast, Below Zero is more character driven. You are constantly being spoken to in the forms of audiologs, other characters can just ‘call you up on the phone’ whenever something relevant happens, plus the main protagonist (Robin) just starts talking to herself sometimes. This is fine in-and-of itself, but for me, it eroded a lot of agency I had to the character. You aren’t alone in the original, but the experience is just lonely enough that when the Sea Empress reaches out and starts talking to you telepathically, it’s a genuinely terrifying moment that makes the player want to explore deeper.

Instead of being listed in chronological timeline, every data/audio log is listed in your databank alphabetically by some arbitrary title. As such, if you lose track of what you were reading/listening because a bruteshark started munching on your leg, or another story-related voice clip started playing over the one you were listening to, it’s very easy to completely lose track of the story. It’s like reading a book where the chapters are in alphabetical title order, rather than by order in the narrative. I completely lost what I was supposed to be doing and had to refer to the wiki to work out what the game wanted me to do next.

The story is delivered to the player in huge chunks, followed by vast spans of total silence when they aren’t finding anything. In my experience, the purpose of audio logs is to offer an alternative to big blocks of text. Audio logs allow the player to continue playing the game whilst absorbing the story. But when audio logs start playing over the top of one another, this completely defeats their purpose. As if there wasn’t enough water to drown in, now the game is trying to drown me in exposition! This is made doubley-frustrating when 90% of the audio logs you find are just pointless character fluff. However, I knew I’d discovered something important or relevant, because of all the overlapping dialogue being spoken! (Keep this in mind because I’ll come back to it later)

There are two maps in-game. Both are difficult to follow and one looks like it was drawn on the back of a napkin with crayons. In Below Zero, it looks like the events are happening a few years after the first game, when Alt-Terra is beginning to expand its colony-building efforts. The game doesn’t have the excuse the original has, where you are a lone survivor stuck on a distant alien planet and the map-making and beacon setting is entirely up to you. Alt-Terra not-having mapped out at least SOME of the terrain above or below sea level for their multi-billion dollar off-world mining/colonialization expedition feels a bit unbelievable.

The dry land exploration in this game is AWFUL. It feels like there’s a blizzard every 10 seconds and when this happens, you can’t see anything. Whilst this is realistic, it sucks in a game about exploring and finding things. This gets even worse at night when the world is dark but the snow fx are full-bright white. My entire screen looked like TV static and it made an otherwise gorgeous environment look absolutely terrible. It feels like the environment and the VFX teams had a massive fight during development and both were trying to sabotage each other’s work!

When I first encountered the glacier where Robin’s sister works, there’s a large broken bridge that needs repairing at the entrance. What the game WANTED me to do was go over to the Phi robotics center, then notice the entrance to the Glacial Basin and start exploring there. And I would have done that, but 1, it was night, 2, there was a blizzard, 3, it wasn’t artificially lit up to indicate that there might be something of importance over there and 4, none of the voice-acting was indicating that area was important after I had explored the base. However, there was lots of dialogue about the bridge that needed repairing and my other companion character said something important was across the bridge. So that MUST be where the game wants me to go, right?

Remember when I said the game indicates when you’re making progress with a barrage of voice-acting? I spent a good hour just bimbling around on the other side of the bridge after I had repaired it. Eventually I just got so frustrated with not being able to see or find anything that I up-ended my sea-truck on the lip of the glacier and did the Arctic Spires location in the Prawn Suit. None of the animals or leviathans pose ANY threat to you as they are only geared up to attack when you’re on the Snowfox, or on foot. In the prawn suit, you can just stomp right past them. Felt like I was ‘Seeing the puppet strings’ a little, at that point.

This may be a very subjective opinion, but I didn’t think much of the creature designs for this game. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I think it’s because all of the dangerous creatures have a similar ‘threat level’ to how they sound. That, and Leviathans will no-longer gobble you up in a single hit. This may have been frustrating to some players in the original, but I found to be a natural incentive to not swim over and hug one, when encountering it. Or get out of your vehicle and chasing it with a scanner. Once I realised most leviathans weren’t deadly in the slightest, all of my fear evaporated and they became more of an annoyance than a threat.

I streamed a bit of the game and spent some time examining one of the hoop-fish. One of my friends commented “It’s amazing how many thousands of lightyears you are away from Earth and you’re still finding alien fish that have the faces of conventional Earth-fish.” This comment stuck with me as I feel there’s some truth to it. This is an alien world, I’d expect the way the creatures look, behave and hunt to be almost completely unrecognizable to anything that happens on Earth. I think it would be unfair to say that all the new creatures in this game are uncreative, but their designs might be a little ‘shallow’, it you’ll pardon the pun.

I found Below Zero unintuitive and a far lesser experience to the first game, even with all the additional content. I can’t say if I recommend this one or not. Maybe play it if you’re burnt out on the first one and want more underwater survival horror in a different flavour? But don’t bother if you’re a fan of the same isolating tension and mute, contemplative narrative. This is where a hack reviewer would say something like “the amount of tension in this game is BELOW ZERO LOLOLOLOLOLO” but I ain’t doing that. Just play the original.

This is one of those games that calls itself a sequel, but is actually just the original with better graphics, a few added extras and a sandbox mode. Luckily, I liked the original when I played it over a decade ago and I like this one too! Problem is, it has exactly the same problems that the original did, with better graphics, a few added extras and a sandbox mode. This is Evil Genius - warts and all.

Let's start with the good stuff. Emma is, without a doubt, the best Evil Genius of the bunch. She looks like Margret Thatcher in a robotic spiderchair and she's voiced by Samantha Bond. I couldn't NOT pick her as my avatar. In terms of the actual gameplay - the basebuilding tools are great. Much more slick than the original. Very fleshed-out interface for drawing new rooms and corridors and linking everything together. It is a little bit annoying that you can't paste over a room with a new one in the editor, it has to be filled in with dirt first before you can start drawing another room template. But that's a minor nitpick.

Honestly where the game falls apart for me is in the same problem the original has. The minions. You can't directly control them, they have zero self-preservation instinct AND they complain if things aren't perfect for them. Plus, the amount of time it takes it to train up an expert minion type is not equal to the amount of time it takes for them to get utterly pulped in a fight. My heart sank every time I saw a conga-line of highly trained socialite minions brainlessly mincing down a hallway towards a swarm of angry H.A.M.M.E.R. soldiers. My heart sank AGAIN at the thought of the highly trained technical minions who would be automatically sent to clean up the remains of the socialite minions, shortly to get pulped by the same soldiers. Eventually, my traps and muscle minions were able to deal with them, but my corridors were littered with bodybags, which lower morale so drastically that a bunch more minions decide to quit - only to get mashed to bits by the same corridor filled with traps and bodybags. One way or another - EVERY encounter like this is going to take minions away from you and there is very little time I spent in this game where I would describe my position as 'stable'. It's very hard to feel truly evil when you have this little control over your own environment, let alone the world.

Which brings me to my second problem I have with this game. The game's campaign length outpaces it's research limit. So there will come a point where you will get to the end of your tier 2 research and the game just stops you from researching any further improvements to your traps, your minions, or the strength of rock you can tunnel through to expand your base. I wouldn't have minded this so much, but I had expanded my base to the absolute limits of the rock I could tunnel through and didn't have any room to make my base any more efficient - meaning I couldn't speed up my actions to progress through the campaign any faster in order to catch up with my research. It felt like I was being artificially restrained for no reason. Again - hard to feel evil when you're on a leash.

My other minor gripe is with the art direction. The original felt like a 3D version of the 1960s retro-futurist spy/superhero novel. The original felt like the 2D graphic sequences in The Incredibles, this one feels a little more like TF2, in terms of style. While that might appeal to a larger, I think the original had it's own unique style and I was hoping they were going to do that, but in HD, for this one. Oh well.

For all my complaints, I still really enjoy this game and I would recommend it to people who are fans of base-builders like Dungeon Keeper. It's an addicting experience, even though it does have a few points where I found myself groaning in frustration. I guess taking over the world isn't meant to be easy though, right?

I've never experienced a game where I couldn't get past the tutorial. :S

I got suckered in by the cool art style and the kickass cyberpunk music and story, then immediately hit a wall when I had to start doing heavy math problems. I might just be dumb, but I didn't pick up anything from the tutorial about how the code was affecting the values, or vise-versa. Nothing is labelled and it was frustrating to complete a task without knowing why it was successful or what I had just done. I know this is supposed to make the experience closer to 'real hacking', but in the tutorial, you are supposed to learn how the functions of the game work. I couldn't understand any of them as there is very little visual feedback for the coding itself.

Also, the idea of having to refer to a real-media manual (known as a 'zine') is a fun concept in theory, but in-practice, the novelty value wears off very quickly when you're having to constantly minimise the game to check a PDF.

I ended up having to look up a walkthrough for the tutorial, eventually. I couldn't work out what to do and neither the game, nor the tutorial was helping. When I found the solution, I still didn't understand why it worked or how the values were affecting the numbers in game. I kept saying “okay, but why does that work?”

Maybe I'm just stupid, but I found this a really unengaging, frustrating experience. Despite what steam’s recommended games say - this is NOT like Baba is You. You have to type out all of your code manually and the game won’t tell you why it’s wrong. You might enjoy this sort of thing if you're a coder by nature, or enjoy doing intense math puzzles for fun, but my eyes glazed over by the time I got to tutorial puzzle 4 and still had no idea what I was doing.

I could have watched more walkthroughs, but I felt like I would have just spent the entire game doing that. Refunded this one.

I got this game on sale and I've really enjoyed it so far. If you're looking for a game with an obsessive amount of micromanagement and complex backstories for your characters, this game probably isn't for you. Dwarf-fortress, it is not. However, I appreciate the gameplay of starting out with a small set of huts and a campfire and watching it blossom into an iron-age fortress filled with 200 people.

The game is a bit bare-bones here and there and not massively challenging, but even in its' current state, the game has a nice building and tech tree aspect to life in an ancient human settlement. My biggest critique is that the hunting isn't very engaging, given that it's a game about prehistoric humans. Animals and people traverse over any terrain with minimal effort like Skyrim horses. You select an animal to hunt, the humans throw sticks at it until it dies. I was expecting something a bit more in-depth like a 'downwind' mechanic? Maybe you have to instruct your hunters to approach their quarry from upwind, otherwise the animal(s) will smell you coming and run away. How about a stealth aspect when hunting something big? Attacking a mammoth head-on with spears and knives is going to get a lot of your hunters killed, but chasing it to the edge of a cliff and spooking the mammoth off the edge of a steep incline can score your hunters an easy low-risk kill. That sort of stuff.

Overall, it's a basic townbuilding experience set in prehistory. It's fun and I see a lot of potential in here. Get it on sale and you aren't expecting paleolithic Frostpunk... yet!

Great little survival experience. Think Frostpunk with the style of Windwaker. It's a little bit light on content at present time of writing (I managed to unlock the tech tree and traverse the entire map in just under 2 hours of gameplay), but I'm the sort of person who enjoys building up the town in different styles to see how I can improve survival efficiency.

It's still open access and I see a lot of other reviews complaining about that. I do agree that the amount of content available is currently not worth the full price of the game, but that's what early access is. You're not buying a finished game. You're buying an IOU. From what I've seen so far, the game shows a lot of promise and potential! Look forward to seeing how it develops. :D

Change, is an early access game that explores a lot of questions most of us would rather not think about. There are currently a lot of bugs and softlocks being patched, so if early access isn't your thing, maybe wait before purchasing. However, if you can look beyond the issues and recognize potential, then read on.

It's a grim truth that a lot of people are one bad month away from homelessness. What would you do if you couldn't pay the rent and you had nobody to support you? Would you resort to begging? Stealing from shops? How easy would it be for you to find a job? Change is a roguelite experience, where the player starts off with nothing and has to plan a strategy in order to get back on their feet. However, some people are less-than-kind and it only takes a few put-downs and bad nights sleep to put the player character into a deep depression that they may never recover from.

Change is set to be a challenging game, not just in the sense of its difficulty. It's a challenge to the pride of the player who truly puts themselves in the character's shoes. Think you've got thick enough skin?

I’ve found that roguelikes can be rather hit-or-miss when it comes to maintaining my interest. I really enjoyed FTL and Rogue Legacy, but Binding of Isaac and Dwarf Fortress didn’t grab me at all. Happily, Enter the Gungeon managed to hit the bullseye (... Sorry, but if you aren't a fan of puns and wordplay, this game is not for you!) With its fast-paced tough-as-nails bullethell gameplay, multiple characters, tons of unlockables and beautiful music, Gungeon is my new favourite game of 2016. I don’t say that lightly. I ADORE this little gem. I’ve played it for hours already and I intend to play it for hours to come.

It does have a couple of problems though. Some people may not be able to see beyond the gameplay and just dismiss it as a clone of Isaac, or Nuclear throne. But the essence of what made those games great is also present in Gungeon. The player is going to get their butt handed to them multiple times before the RNG will provide them with suitable items and weaponry for taking down the final boss. The only other problem I had with the game is that the 45 degree top-down perspective to the gameplay can sometimes give the player a bit of a skewed idea about where they reside spatially. This can lead to taking accidental damage, which can mean all the difference when health drops are entirely randomised.

A lot of people may despise bullethells for their nature. Why would you play a game where there’s nowhere on the screen you can stand without taking damage? That’s cheap! But Gungeon has the answer to this, in the form of its Blanks and dodge-rolling. The player has a limited amount of blanks, but they can clear a room of every single enemy bullet, as well as knock back enemies. Very good last-resort game mechanic for when the player is in a super-hostile environment.

As I mentioned earlier, the game is full of puns and wordplay. Everything within the Gungeon is somehow based on munitions. The enemies, the bosses, the weaponry, even the scenery in some cases. Even the most basic mobs are little bulletpeople with revolvers! Although I do question if one of them ever looked into the breach of their gun, realised what their ammunition was and had a ‘Soylent Green’ moment.

If you like cartoony roguelikes with the difficulty cranked up to 11 – this one is for you.

Don’t get me wrong. I really want to like this game. An MMO Battle Royale with a perks and weapon crafting / selling mechanic is a fantastic idea. I was incredibly addicted to playing this, for a while. However, there are problems. Painful, clunky, frustrating problems.

I used to use ARMA 3 as a benchmark for clunky FPS controls, but the Culling is on a whole other level. The problem is the same as ARMA in that the actions of the player feel extremely vapid and ‘floaty’ in terms of feedback. This, coupled with sonic-the-hedgehog speed at which people can run circles around the player leads for a very twitchy and broken experience when it comes to melee combat.

The player can block a melee attack at any time (although someone still needs to explain to me how a human being can absorb a katana strike with their bare arms and still HAVE arms afterwards), but there is also a shove button, which can break the block of an opponent. Neither of these options seemed to work when I did them. Strikes were getting through my blocks and opponents were able to instantly recover from my shoves and stunlock me with their own. Sometimes the sound would cut out mid-fight, throwing off melee feedback completely. I had to stop playing when I managed to kill someone with a crafted knife, and they managed to kill me with their bare fists ... at the same time. I was culled by the lag.

Eventually I managed to cull my way up to the last two people. I’ve made a lot of use in the poison blowgun for a nice cheap stunlock on an opponent. We both reached the center podium and charged towards each other for a brutal climactic showdown! ... But I did not win, because they had a gun. If you get lured into a melee fight with somebody and they pull a gun out – you’re done. It’s an incredibly cheap way to kill somebody and it doesn’t feel nearly as rare or balanced as it should be. I question why the game needs to have gun combat in it at all, if only to save itself from the awful clunky melee. The problem is that there is no real strategy if you bring a knife to a gunfight. You could try and knock it out of their hands with a melee strike, but all they have to do is quickly put the weapon away or block. The guns feel incredibly overpowered.

The sad thing is, all of the above would be tolerable if there wasn't such a long waiting period from the point of death to getting back into the action. But I was waiting in queues for up to 15 minutes before getting into a game. The pacing of the user-experience really needs some work.

I never thought I would say this, but I feel the Culling could really do with TF2-style random crits that negate blocks, or do more damage. The pro players would hate it, but it would make the game much more accessible to new players as well as stopping the combat system from feeling like a laggy game of rock-paper-scissors.

In its present state, the Culling is VERY rough around the edges. It’s not completely unplayable, but there are way too many problems with the melee feedback system for me to recommend it to others. Wait a few months for the developers to either fix the combat, or recycle it for F.U.N.C. ... Will review the Culling again at a later date, when they've fixed some things.

...

Also the crouching literally ducks your head down by like, 2 inches. Either let me go prone to hide in long grass, or get rid of this feature completely!

It's time to grab a spacetank and start hurling explosives through the gravity wells of the solar system with the aim of blasting your opponents into moondust - or at the very least, vaporising the planetary floor from under their treads! It's nice to see an early access multiplayer game with such fully-formed and enjoyable game mechanics. However, there is a bit of a problem, in that multiplayer has yet to be implemented.

I always try to base my reviews on the singleplayer elements alone, but this sort of crazy arcade action game is in dire need of a human element in order to keep the gameplay fresh. The developers have promised that this element is of top priority and will be implemented ASAP (so I'll update my review accordingly), but until then, all the player has to fight are bots. Dumb, slow, suicidal bots.

At first, I thought the easy setting was just there to introduce new players to the gameplay, but after just a few minutes of play, I was winning flawless deathmatch victories against 3 Hardcore bots. Once the player gets hold of certain powerups like the laser or homing missile, they are pretty much unstoppable. These should either be nerfed, or made harder to get a hold of, perhaps by splitting up the components over a match, which the player needs to collect by traversing from planet to planet, or blowing up opponents that have collected a weapon component they need.

I've pointed out a lot of problems with Moonshot, but only because I want to see it improve. I'm also giving it a positive recommendation because I want to see more of my friends playing it ... so I can crush them 'neath my armoured tread.

This star system aint big enough for the 4 of us!

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for cute story worlds with dark, mysterious undertones - and Poncho here is no exception! It’s a pixelated post-apocalyptic perspective-based puzzle-platformer (try and say that without spitting everywhere) set in the overgrown ruins of a futuristic dystopia. All assemblance of animal life is missing. Even the tiny snails lurching along the stalks of pixelated grass are entirely robotic. The machines have taken over and formed a society of their own. But, much like an allegory for the current decline of the mobile games industry, a society cannot function on shameless cloning and metric data alone. The machines lack the human quality to innovate and evolve and subsequently digress into small tribes of nomads. Now they wander the earth, falling apart, cursed by their own immortality as the last computerized image of a human face slowly decays from their rusting harddrives. Into this bleak arena steps Poncho, a small blue mini-fridge with a tablecloth stuck in his door, on a quest to find the illusive creator and restore humanity to its former glory.

Poncho plays like a condensed version of Fez, another pixelated perspective-based puzzle-platformer (spit spit), but unlike Fez, the developer of Poncho hasn’t been ostracized from the internet for declaring war on his critics, playerbase and youtube lets-players; so pre-emptive brownie points for you, Delve Interactive! To contrast the mechanics of Fez, instead of spinning the entire world around on axis, Poncho exists within 3 or 4 two-dimensional ‘layers’ in the background and foreground, allowing the player to platform jump between them in order to collect keys and shiny red floating sweeties. This makes for some mind-bending exploration puzzles when the platforms are static, but it becomes downright infuriating when the platforms start to move a few levels in. Not the standard left-to-right floating platforms most gamers have become accustomed to. The floating platforms in Poncho shift through every dimensional layer within the Z-axis of the gamespace.

This led to multiple situations where I would mistime a jump, land on a platform, only to have the existential rug ripped out from under my feet, or worse - get blindsided in mid-air by a shifting platform as it suddenly occupied the same space as Poncho, smashing the last hope for humanity into quantum glitch soup. The constant shifts between orthographic and perspective views can give the player a rather sketchy view of where they reside spatially. Luckily, Poncho has opted for the Super Meat Boy school of design in that the time between ‘death’ and respawn is almost instantaneous. It's difficult without being punishing.

However, Poncho isn’t all about the platform dimension jumping. There is also quite a strong focus on exploring the open world and being able to come back to any level during the game to collect any keys, sweeties or powerups that you may have missed. Boasting an ‘open world exploration’ element in a game like this is usually shorthand for back-tracking. Fortunately, the level design is fairly tight and succinct, meaning that the player doesn’t have to retread too much ground in order to reach new heights -unlike Fez, where the landscape was so vast and complex that my desire to explore it would evaporate almost immediately. Poncho does its best to keep the next little shiny red breadcrumb always in sight of the player, giving them a firm idea of areas they haven’t explored yet. There are also a couple of fun secrets and easter eggs to keep the completionists checking under every rock!

As a whole, I found Poncho surfing the knife-edge between challenge and controller-smashing frustration. If you fudge a jump, it’s your fault for not thinking ahead X amounts of steps. Perhaps this will amalgamate to that wonderful ‘good’ kind of frustrating which will keep more determined players slogging away until they get it right. But what really sold me on Poncho is the charm of the characters within. It’s show-don’t-tell for the most part, which intrigues me to improve my platforming skill if only to reveal a little bit more of the world!

So if you have a high tolerance for MeatBoy-esque difficulty and enough spare controllers and keyboards to justify hurling a few against the wall, love cute colourful storyworlds and little robot folk, Poncho is for you. For this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper ... as the player misses a platform jump for the umpteen-billionth time.