Recent reviews by Snazzman

What makes a good survivors game?
the answer is simple, Gimmick. But what do I mean by this? let me unpack that ever so slightly. For all the glory of Vampire Survivors, It is kind of bare bones in places. now it doesnt need more meat on it, it fills up with the love letter to Castlevania that it has been for all its time, the silly Italian versions of the names etc. etc.
Now its easy to just copy paste and "re write the homework" so the teacher wont notice, which is where theme comes in. Halls of torment chose diablo over Castlevania. Soulstone Survivors chose a different artstyle and more character focus. Rogue Genesia is confusing, and hyperborian survivors is russian.
these things separate the proverbial wheat from the chaf. Im sure there are more examples but i doubt there is an interest in longwinded reviews that dont stay on topic.
This game chose the 80s bruce lee movies. and it lives up to it. Screw the passive items, its all about adding things to your move list. match the colors and watch as your little Jackie Chan wanna-be becomes a god of the wallmart brawl. It adds in its features at a good pace so you dont get your head stuck on any one mechanic, and is, in my eyes, a solid survivors game I will most likely sink more hours into.

9/10, needs more drunken master moves but Im not being judgemental

This has been a long time coming. and as such for those of you who just want to know "should I buy this game?" I will say yes
Do it. Or wait for a sale and do it. The game is a little short on content but what is there is solid, smooth and by god does it feel good. The game oozes 40k, the grimdark drips from it like juice from an orange and I give it a high recommendation.

Let me be frank for a moment (Hi frank), In this modern world, a whole century in to the culture war raging it is rare to find something that says: "♥♥♥♥ that, lets be authentic for a second". This game does that and it is a breath of fresh air. Who has time to give a ♥♥♥♥ when there are Tyranids invading. And belive me when I say they are INVADING. the skies blackened by swarms of flying creatures, the ground packed so densly by a moving horde of teeth and claws you will forget the color of the moss given time. But that is where you come in, JOHN WARHAMMER! joke aside, This game picks up roughly 200 years after the first one. Titus, the titular space marine from the first game, is serving penance as a black shield in the deathwatch. [This means that he is effectively in exile, and that his chapter colors are removed, which is a great dishonor to most] He and a squad of his bretheren in the deathwatch are sent to Kadaku to detonate a virus bomb [Weaponized virus that will spread and mutate wildly while devouring as much as it can before dying] to slow down the approaching Tyranid invasion. Things go to ♥♥♥♥, and they do so quickly. Titus is knocked out of the Aircraft and plummets to the ground, damaging his communicator, he lives though but has to listen to the chatter as his brothers are picked off by the ravenous hive mind. He finds the bomb, gets it to the orbital launcher and detonates it in low orbit, but sadly after a heroic last stand (?) he gets impaled by a carnifex and almost dies.

that was the tutorial, now you are in the game for real real. In the games Campaign you play as titus post the rubricon surgery [A surgery that upgrades a standard astartes, space marine, to a primaris, space marine 2.0] This was ordered by the chapter master himself and you are immediately put to work. I will not spoil further for the campaign here but suffice to say its good stuff

I have heard that some people are experiencing bugs of various sorts and I feel for them, I do. I have had ALOT of good time with the game almost entirely bug free. aside from some latency here and there but I blame the internet for that. I cannot speak for the people who has suffered from this however as I am not one of them. take that as you will.
The game is beautiful. Gorgeus, absolutely stunning even, and it feels really good to play. The Space Marines move fast and heavy you can see the impact of your characters wheight, strength and speed. Now this studio has another interesting game behind it as far as Horde shooters go, World War Z. I enjoyed that title, and I must say as a choice for who got to make this game, it was a good one. The engine utilizes the horde mechanics it has to the fullest, as you are unloading magazine upon magazine into a relentless horde of Tyranids, they die, they explode they crumble to bits, but they just. Keep. Coming.
Now this game is a powerfantasy. dont get that twisted, for your average Guardsman in this war this is the stuff nightmares are made of. Ravenous swarms of gnashing teeth and razor sharp claws of every shape and size, Armored Angels crashing against the hordes and yet, the horde does not stop. You call in everything. artillery, Airstrikes, tanks, anything you can think of and it just. keeps, comig.

It feels great honestly. despite your ridiculous strength and agility the enemies are still a threat. you can drown in a pile of gaunts. You have to display some of that gamer knowledge and wisdom to win fights at times. tactics are good options. The game lets you play the "campaign" either alone with two bots or with two buddies. Then there is the co-op missions, currently 7 of them, where you can do the same. this time with a different cast of characters. These are fun missions slightly shorter than a campaign mission but equal amounts of satisfying ultraviolence. and on top of this there is also PvP.
Now I personally think that the game is very good, but I have a few gripes here and there, such as for all its variety in animation, the so called: "Extremis" level threats, special enemies, have one, maybe two execution animations. now considering the amount of work the devs have put in to the game already with ordinary enemies having dozens each this is fine, I guess, but when I impale my 8th lictor for the day in the exact same way I did the other 7, it gets a little stale. every door opens with the same 3 buttons being pressed, and some of the shortcuts taken does begin to show with time. The variety necessary for you to turn a blind eye to this stuff isnt there. even if it is a great experience, if you suffer from a little hit of the tism, like me, you can and will probably find something that does impede your enthusiasm a little.

Might update this at some point, 8/10
For the Emperor

To those with no attentionspan: Its a cool game about being a little guy caught inbetween 3 warring factions with huge ♥♥♥♥-off mecha and landbound-warships that eclipse you. You are not John Warhammer, not John Spacemarine, you are John civilian with a few hours in the gun range just trying to make it to tomorrow. If you like Extraction shooters but prefer PvE, Its really interesting.

To those who have not suffered the brainrot; A very interesting game. as mentioned above, you are a scav. short for scavenger, like a rodent forced to look through pockets of fallen soldiers and trashcans for your daily bread. You live far beneath the surface, where the thunder of guns is barely audible as you gather water and other civilians to your little hub. You manage to set up some deal with parts of the 3 factions, the Euruskans, Eurasian and Europan armies, for little tasks to complete in order for you to score some extra water and possibly better firepower.
Then comes the world. My L O R D the world is amazing. A hellscape of a future where a war has gone on for so long that nobody fighting remembers why they do, just that someone is dying today. Your journey to the surface isnt reflected, nor is your return to the bowels of the world, but once you are in, you see something I call "the beauty of absolute devastation". there is a serene beauty to the remains of the blown out buildings and quiet mesas. Then there is the ruins of giant warmachines, burning wrecks of tanks, loads upon loads of dead people, and all in all, the aesthetic is Immaculate.
An aspect I love is that, yes, you can gun down a small patrol. You can probably take down a tank or so, but now you arent just a rodent, you are a problem, and the powers that be will not hesitate to turn your meaty husk into rations for their fighting forces, You must be careful. To avoid getting yourself overwhelmed because you aren't a murder-cyborg, you must be picky with your targets, consider your location, other enemy forces and timing and you can snag yourself some really good loot. when the giant ♥♥♥♥-off mech turns its guns towards you, its a pants-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ experience because you are most likely about to spend a night on gods couch. Sure, you will just be able to continue if you die, its a video game, but now your guns and the rig you carried are out there, and you will have to waste time and effort to either retrieve or buy this stuff again. You have a timer, measured in days. A water supply that if not filled, you will lose your progress. at the one end its something that will turn some off, but on the other it adds some stakes to things. you can store up to 55 days of water initially. and getting guns and characters back into ship-shape isnt that much of a hassle, but I can understand how that amount of lost progress would be upsetting.

Over all I will say this: If you like Extraction shooters, bleak worlds and a little bit of hope, not for peace or a better future, but for survival, then the game is good. It suffers a little from bugs, you will crouch-walk yourself into a mound and now you are stuck, until you find the angle you entered through, you are stuck. Enemies will sometimes notice you through walls, or buildings. Sometimes you will be relentlessly hunted down by a pack of enemies who by all UI indication doesnt know where you are, but are approaching you rapidly.

Its early access, its not perfect by any standards and will require months if not years of polish to reach the peaks of absolute kino, but the potential is there and I recommend it. Wait for later updates, or 1.0 or get in early, the choice is yours

Warning, this review will probably continue spoilers regarding the games "story", cannot say much in regard to its online experience.

So you've come back, for more EDF!, which is a craving I too have had. More dead monsters, more dead aliens. Now to make your day a little bit more informed, Its a better EDF 5 in gameplay, its a bit more polished as far as model and area fidelity, but its not so much that you will be amazed.

Story: The story starts 3 years after EDF 5 ends, and everything is ♥♥♥♥. What little remains of humanity and the EDF is Doing their best to fight the remnants of the Primer forces. The primers left after the loss in EDF 5, and their forces that were deployed on the surface remain. You start at base 251, as the character from EDF 5, you are part of a reinforcement of the area. over a few missions you get to see how everything sucks and people are starving, the primers forces are starving, the monsters are doing ok, I guess. then comes a ship looking like a large ring, and a series of mysterious alien ships appear. the ring activates and the ships travel through it. the mission after looks terrible, new enemies: "androids" and the skies have darkened. You assault the ring aaaaand, you are back at your first mission as a newly inlisted soldier in the EDF.
Timetravel, thats it. thats the big issue. The primers can travel through time and due to you crashing the ship, you go back in time.

I will leave that there for now.
I think the game is pretty cool, kind of fun and at times a little frustrating. Its more of the same. but with larger variety in enemies and a few new bells and whistles that makes Ranger and Air-raider more fun.

Get it on sale, not sure if the "epic store link" is going to go away or stay but wether or not that is a stipulation for you, is up to you at the end of the day.

If you want a tongue in cheek kind of game about killing, dying and dropping in on the enemy that killed you in a very bullet shaped pod for maximum karma, Id recommend it

Friendly fire isnt
and by that I mean its always on, and for everything
You dropping in a gascloud on a tango 180 feet ahead (60m) and one of your squadmates is a bit close? guess who is having the equalivent of inhaling hydrochloric acid done to him. You wanna drop 500kg of explosive force on something but someone is busy curbstomping a bot nearby? call that man C.C. - Corporal Collateral.

A whole lot of fun ways to kill - both your enemies and your friends
So far the warfront is only a double, Bots and Bugs. Bugs dont shoot back but they can jump real good, charge through a hab-unit or just walk right over that ♥♥♥♥. Bots will shoot at you but at least you will always see or hear them coming. They dont need to hide to get close enough to reunite your nervous system with the soil. You are however not fending them off with your two best friends, Liberty and justice (your fists), but with a decent arsenal of guns, primary and secondary, grenades and support weapons you call in to the battlefield. Flamethrower, Machineguns, Railgun, Rocket launcher, Arc thrower, grenade launcher, the gangs all here. You can also request orbital bombardment, your big gunship firing from low orbit, Eagle supporting fire, A gunship hanging around the battle field waiting for you to call her up (I should call her), a variety of sentries, and various supporting packs

Do you want to defend Managed Democracy, Freedom, Liberty, and any other word meaning your freedom from outside forces? Then Suit up, Helldiver. Super Earth needs you

Aight so im gonna be a little controversial
I like it and would recommend it if you, like me, have an almost pavlovian response to the sound of chainswords.

The good:
Holy moly on a roly poly, this feels 40k. Fatshark has, yet again, shown that they got that eye for detail that makes the setting work. no thing is overlooked, whether it be a disgusting mattress in a "Hygiene compartment" (read shower) or a nice big lump of disgusting plagued flesh growing from or on someones corpse. The music bangs, slaps and even calls you the the day after to make sure you got home right. It goes hard and when the chaos of gunfire, vicious flailing and the howls of hungering poxwalkers somehow fall into harmony, It feels really really good

The not so good: Its not Vermintide in 40k. You make a character with a neat little backstory, your pick from one of 3 voices for every class, make that six if you count that all but the ogryn have women versions of the voices. Even in the 41st millenium there are still women. Yet for all your finagling to make the apex discord moderator you realize that you, the character means diddly and squat. The story revolves around the agents Serving the good Inquisitor, and what little things you get to hear about them. Now the interactions and voice acting is just fine, but I never really feel myself super immersed in them. You do get little cinematics where they either scold you for existing or tell you: "Keep working you karkin meatsack". Alot has been done to make the game far better than it was on release. But I also kind of want more. I can only invest myself so much into it, yet get very little in return.
For all of our hard work, we get the proverbial open palmed pat on the bum and a "good job" but never do we get visible progress for our work. To make comparisons, In Vermintide 2 your castle will update based on your progress, the characters will move into personal quaters, Flags will be hung to show how far you have come, With more flags depending on how high of a difficulty you've mastered. You get an asspat from guardsman barry in passing in Darktide.

The bad: Weapon variety and class variety has been slowly updated, and thats the key word. slowly. Now bare in mind, The veteran has an abundance of weapons, some more viable than others, but there is variety there. The Zealot has some variety, with a little more lean on the melee part, but still, variety. Then you have psyker and Ogryn. Psykers get some fun stuff, but in the end you really start to fall into a form of pattern with it, depending on what you want to do. You wanna drown the world in warpfire? you can almost do that, You wanna utilize barriers to provide security for your team? you can but its a little loosey goosey when it comes to other aspects to it. You have 3 varieties of Force sword, 4 staffs, your "grenade" which is one of 3 choices and your "ability". in the end you are left with 8 - 9 psyker things, which do feel psyker-isch but there should be more. Ogryns get by with very little, at least in weaponry, which is to some degree understandable, being ogryns and all. but at the same time, If you can carry a twinlinked heavy-stubber (a large browning mg glued on top of another browning mg with a linked trigger) what other fun things can you have? not much, big one shot shotgun, the standard ripper gun with 5 varieties and a pair of fairly unique but still grenade launchers. compared to the zealot and Veterans sheer amount of weapons its paltry, it makes me sad. Melee is a little better, You get several varieties of "knoif" with different attack patterns. Shovels, but big, A power-maul in a singular variety. Some "bashas" with is Ogryn for "blunt force trauma on a stick" one handed, and Shield/mauls.

I recommend it because it is very enjoyable, it really looks feels and sounds like 40k, but so far as story goes, dont expect alot, your character has like, 4 or 5 quips based on party composition but otherwise? nah. Its all saved for the retinue and we dont get to see much of it sadly

I want to love it alot more than I do, but some things are genuine hiccups for me, and I cannot in good conscious say its near perfect or completely done yet

Update: As of the secrets of the omnissiah update, A few new bells and whistles have been added. A two handed Pick for the Ogryn, Shock mauls for everyone else, and a bolt-pistol. oh and a double barreled shotty. The mission is good, more dripfed lore but so far, we're at least not to bad off inb4 Spehss Muhrine 2 comes out. Is it alot better now than then? No but we have some more stuff at least

An interesting Tower defense (?) game, with a hinted at Deep Lore that needs someone way more investigative than I to expand upon.

The premise is simple, You work in hell, You pick your closest co-worker and set about keeping the damned souls in hell. Now how do you do this? Well you have a tower at the center of the level, various upgrades you get as cards which you can apply to your tower. You want a weird thing that calls down lightning on your enemies? A good old fashioned minigun that targets the closest enemy in a radius? game has you covered. There are also things like minions, Do you want the suicidal hellfire exploders that explode upon contact with enemies? do you want weird walking crosses that create a small zone of holy energy that hurts many enemies at once? these are for you.

Of course, all of these things are subject to various levels of efficiency and "worth" as a chosen upgrade, as you can get little run-effective buffs. Your minions can get faster, shoot faster, shoot harder or longer. Same thing for the "turrets" you place on your tower.
there are plenty of little fun gimmics and quirks both for the various cards you can get and your Co-workers and their special abilities.

each level is composed of a number of Rounds, each harder than the previous. Each level is designed after one of the circles of hell. Limbo - Lust - Gluttony - Wrath - Greed, they are all here and come with their own enemies and challanges for you. everything is very well illustrated and has a weird uncanny yet very stylish and consistent artstyle. Then there is the inbetween, because there isnt much to say about the music, It slaps. it bangs, it absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥ I dare say. in between the runs you do you have access to a menu screen that looks alot like your standard desktop monitor for any ordinary office job. Its very much what I would expect was on Rob Parrs' computer at his miniscule desk in the Incredibles (the first movie)

Its a very interesting little game with dark humorous little things, Like an email chain about some guys starting a podcast just for the next email to be the total outlawing of podcasts. but thats just the surface.

Its a survivors game with some things in english, some things in russian. At least I think its russian, Could be any slavic language using those funny letters they use

I have no Idea what Im doing, Im not sure where Im going but things are dying and I am having an ok time. Alot of bass heavy music, mainly electronic so if you are not a fan, Cant say I recommend but otherwise its an interesting little title I didnt pay alot for and got a little more than I wanted out of

Now Im no writer, despite my concurrent disposition of writing a review, but I am an enjoyer of videogames.
I have enjoyed Games Like Vampire Survivors alot, and so long as each iteration or variation actually brings a variation or zest that makes it different, Most people can find some value in it.

Considering the boom of these, I belive the term is mosu-games(?), I will take it upon myself to review a few of these I have played to tell you if its different enough, and if its good.

And this one is. on both accounts.
This one comes with an old twang on the Diablo nostalgia banjo, with the varius characters being defined only by their "class". Swordsman, Exterminator, Cleric, Warlock etc. but each character comes loaded with a quirky weapon which is rather obvious to their name and have their own attack patterns. The Swordsman swings his big sword creating a small cone. The Exterminator carries a Flamethrower that deals less direct damage but lights up his foes like a field of dry wheat. The Cleric and his holy scepter makes a wider cone than the swordsman but with less direct damage but he attacks in two instances and has a chance to give his enemies a debuff so on and so forth.

The thing here is that for weapons, you get one. Skills is the name of all those funky abilities that all characters can use, Like Wizard orbs that float around you in a circle, the Arcane Splinter which leaves small rotating stars that deal damage. The Golem which will fight your enemies and then enjoy becoming a ball and rolling over your enemies at high speeds. These come with their own upgrades and variables. every time you level up you get to pick an upgrade, it could be something like an overall increase to your strength by 8% which is direct damage, to all your sources of damage. It could also be something more direct, like more focused things to each skill or your weapon.

the game has an interesting quest system and gear customisations that can alter your play styles somewhat radicly however you can only extract one gear item from every run in a stage. I have opinions but I can understand that choice. I will say this as a closing statement:

Its a fun diablo inspired twist on the genre and if you have the time and the money I would recommend it. it lacks the absolute bangers of an OST some others have but I think that fits with its vibe. Diablo 1 and 2 did not bring out those kinds of tracks at every moment.

8/10 - Can get repetitive but if you are willing to grind you will eventually probably go somewhere

Since I was but a small lad, I have been an edgy ♥♥♥♥♥ to my core. This has only been reinforced over many years, many shows, many games.

Had this game existed when I was small, I would dress in bones and dark green clothing, for nothing on the market comes close to the experience of being a bone-afide (necessary pun) necromancer

Fight things, raise them, fight more things with your ever growing army of the dead. A game much like binding of Isaac and hades, yet different in some of it choices of flavor

Live, die, return to your little castle, throw bants at your little circle of homebois, upgrade stuff and live again.

9/10 - I lost a run because my skeletons got stuck behind a small house