Recent reviews by Thlrd

i miss my wife...

This is legitimately one of the best games I've ever played, however, I can not in good conscious recommend it to anyone until they re-balance alot of the content. I say this after beating the game with 76% of content complete.
I know I have a bit of a silk-issue, but also come on y'all gotta chill with the 2x damage from basically everything.
Would be nice if the tool cost was changed, because I basically never wanted to use tools because of their cost. Same deal with spells, but in the case of those, I needed the silk to heal the damage the enemy did to me by touched me when it was stunned. Also corpse runs- those are really rough, but for the most part chill out alot starting in act 2.

Antimatter Dimensions is an excellent idle game, where your goal is to push numbers as far as possible. A ton of intricate systems that go hand in hand, overall a shorter experience in terms of idle games. Only taking me about half a year to complete on my first run (ignoring the solid 3 years I stopped playing it). I can not recommend it enough for those out there who like to see that Number Go Up.

Having private lobbies back is a blessing. This was always a fun lil group DM game and having these back in is perfect. Keep up the good work Dids!

It's ok I guess. Doesn't have enough content imo

Hunt: Showdown was a great game.
Hunt: Showdown 1896 is not.

There used to be a time where Hunt was my favorite FPS, I adored Hunt for a long time. The gameplay loop and gunplay were masterfully crafted with a wonderful art direction and sound design that tied everything together. The lore, art style and aesthetic of the western apocalypse was masterfully handled for most of Hunt's life. Sadly, I can't say that anymore especially with the announcement of the Scream collaboration.

Let's start with the actual game play before getting into the worst aspects of Hunt. I'll explain this in a more understandable and generalized way for those who aren't familiar with Hunt as I am. The core loop of spawning on the edges of the map and slowly making your way in, trying to locate the 'boss' to kill then take your bounty to the extraction zone is frankly awesome. The stress of moving fast while worrying about the other hostile players and AI in the match is wonderful, tight timer and fast paced combat where all of your shots count. The gunplay itself is slow and calculated, there is only 1 fully automatic weapon in the game with burst fire capabilities, being the Huot auto (Avto). Even still, the Huot is rather difficult to use for most players, but in the right hands is insanely powerful. There are a few semi-automatic weapons in the game, such as the Dolch (C96), Drilling, or Bergmann 1896 (Bornheim No. 3). All of these examples are quite powerful but balanced (with the exception of the Drilling which is one of the best weapons in the game). Everything else in the game is a mix of bolt actions, lever actions, pump actions or hammer primed weapons with slow but smooth feeling gunplay and flow. It adds a whole other level to skill for timing your shots and calculating when to strike, as that shot you take may be the only one you need.

With 1896's launch they had changed things up by adding bullet drop. I was skeptical on it's addition especially since Crytech themselves had talked about how it does not fit into the game. It's not the most noticeable but it ended up buffing Snipers inadvertently due to how much easier it is to take shots with a scope then it is with ironsights since you can see more of your enemy with a scope. Additonally in 1896 they added the ability to one-shot headshot at any range, which I am mixed on personally.

Hunt: Showdown 1896 is slowly becoming Call of Duty 1896 with the degradation and deterioration of the identity of the game. The August update brought a lot of promise, with moving to a new engine and getting a new map, but it's clear they didn't really have a proper QA team to test the game given how both awful the new UI is, to put it bluntly, the worst UI I have ever had the displeasure of using. Let me break it down for you:


1 - Large panels that take up a large amount of the screen that makes it difficult to go to other pages and navigate back and forth. I find it incredibly diffiult to move back and forth on the scroll bits because of how it's currently designed. If there was a scale option this would be atleast 50% better instantly.

2 - It's easy to accidentally enter a menu when just trying to click the scroll button, too many times I have clicked into the menu buttons when just clicking the arrow.

3 - Constant skipping problems when navigating up and down. further it's very difficult to know what's above a selected area

4 - The loadout screen. While yes they did update it, it's still a drastic downgrade compared to what we had prior due to how clunky it is and how convoluted it is to actually equip and change items on both your saved loadouts and your hunter's loadouts.

5 - The Hunter set up menu is very bad, the perk menu which is a bit roundabout to enter, is small and a bit hard to navigate, which I wish was an option for the rest of the menus. Further the perk order seemingly randomizes itself for no reason without changing the sort order or favorites.

6 - The weapons page (armory thingy I forget what it's called) has very poor design to it in terms of navigation and sorting. THE CROSSBOW IS CONSIDERED A RIFLE, WHAT?! The idea is not terrible but the execution is awful as it requires constant back and forth to actually navigate to the gun you want. The weapon skin tab is a step back, prior it was on the gun and you click through the skins you have, instead you have to sort through the skins you don't have then equip the skin you do have (which is often not the first skin available. This is less of a problem if you have all of the dlc's and a lot of the bb weapons).

7 - The main menu shows you the shop before you can click to stats, the armory and many other useful pages which is at the bottom for some unknown reason. More of a nitpick, but it seems very greedy to have it that way if you want to just use the main menu instead of the top tabs.

8 - The battle pass screen is a step back, prior it was easy to navigate as it had sub tabs you can click to easily. Now you have to click out of the BP menu, then into the other sub menus if you want to interact with the other menus.

9 - This is the best sumup of the menus, the amount of times you have to click or use the keyboard has gone up drastically. This is a sign of inherently bad design. This is the reason we haven't changed the BF main menu yet actually, as to not make things more clunky and cumbersome to use for the user, requiring more clicks to play the game for instance. Is it minor? Yes, but in order to play the game, you must use the UI. The UI is the entry point. It can not be overstated how important it is for a game.

10 - The changes they have displayed are a step forword, yes, but there is a ton of room for improvement still.

11 - The post match screen is a lot more bland and difficult to use, where as prior it was one click and you saw everything and was easily read. It had a charm to it that worked where as now it's just a gray box that you have to click through a few times to move back to the main menu.

12 - The pause menu is rather clunky and suffers the same problems as the main menu. It baffles me they would change the pause menu and then also remove useful info such as teammates loadouts at a glance.

13 - The lobby menu feels very cluttered, poorly organized and quite annoying to use with random contrivances and removals of features we used to have (such as the easily viewable MMR you currently rated as).

14 - The roster screen is incredibly cluttered and unnecessarily large. You used to be able to easily click to a different hunter or recruit a new hunter, and now you have to slowly scroll past your hunters (if you have, let's say, 8 for example and want to scroll from the 8th to the 2nd one it takes a stupid amount of time to do so where as previously it was very easy to just click from the 8th to the 2nd)

In summery, UI bad.

Moving on from that, the erosion of Hunt's identity is clear in the direction they are taking things. Even ignoring the obvious in-CODification, Hunt had a clear "nearly no magic" stance and with the new C4 and revive bolt it's clear they couldn't care less on keeping things like that, they feel both too modern and too fantastical to fit in the finely crafted setting they had. Then, the new "Legendary Hunters", the pumpkin guys, feel almost whimsical. Then mix in the Scream Crossover with Ghost Face? It's clear they have no passion for the game, only the money they make. I can excuse the constant DLC to ensure a constant money-flow, but I can't excuse introducing a 1990's horror film icon into a game set in the 1890's.

It's clear that Crytech no longer cares about the game, with their blatant ignorance to the communities outcry to a majority of things they have been doing recently. Sadly, I know they aren't going to care or listen, even if they say they will and do.

Word of advice? Speak with your wallet, don't give them a dime and stay far away from this shambling corpse of a game. I know I will be.

There is massive promise, even for a demo there is a ton of content and replay-ability. I've gone through most of the content (I think) and there is still plenty more to do. Combat is quite simple overall and it feels quite easy to navigate through most encounters conserving resources and making it to the (current) end of the game.

Was great, now it's gone.

Is good.

A truly wonderful program that has more then well surpassed every other pixel art centered program that I have used, even having some tools that outshine programs that I use for some photoshop related things.

At first it took a bit to get used to, the default UI in my opinion is not the greatest but it's far from unusable. I personally ended up using the 'Dark Mort' theme which is rather pleasant and felt like a good size given the proportions of my monitor.

I have been using Aesprite in tandem with BlockBench for model creation and texturing for my project, BlockFront. Aesprite has some problems when it comes to tabbing out, and frequently causes the cursor to vanish unless you tab back into Aesprite and then select a different brush/cursor altering tool. I've also noticed that sometimes when tabbing out the brush size will change, fortunately this is easy enough to change by holding control and scrolling the mouse wheel.

In terms of features, Aesprite is jam packed. The addition of having the ability to adjust the pallet via the 'Adjustments' menu is very nice and has saved a ton of time with some weapon skin creation. However not having a fast way of selecting all of some colors is rather annoying, and not having the ability to alter layer transparency (that I am aware of) is rather saddening.

The worst feature that I have had nothing but problems however, would be the current rotation system. It's very unintuitive if you try to go about using it with the mouse, so much so that the only way to use it for 45 degree rotations is by using keybind shortcuts instead (which is not necessarily a bad thing). If you don't use shortcuts, rotations don't quite line up as expected nor do they tend to rotate the way you would hope. Outside of that, everything else works great.

Overall, despite some flaws Aesprite is a truly wonderful pixel art centered art program that I can not recommend enough, for both beginners, experts and everyone in-between.