Recent reviews by popcar2

Quest Master is just fantastic. I don't mean to put other games down, but it is leagues ahead of other "maker" games like Super Dungeon Maker. It's not even close.

Let's start with the gameplay itself: The controls are tight and very enjoyable. There's a good variety of enemies and items, and a ton of creative ways to use many of them. There's some you will expect like a boomerang and grappling hook, but quite a bit of unique ones like a wand that creates tornados which shoot you upwards, or a ghost lantern that shows invisible objects around you.

Dungeons can have multiple floors and there's so much you can do with it like being able to see floors below you and fall down to them assuming the level creator lets you. There's also a detailed map that automatically updates the more you explore, with teleporters to move around easily - encouraging huge levels and exploration without feeling lost!

One thing that surprised me is that there's some meta progression to Quest Master, there are rings you gain over time that grant you small bonuses when playing levels, and NPCs that visit the town at certain times to play small minigames. Pretty fun!

The production quality is S-tier as you can probably guess. Art, music, and sound effects are lovely and full of detail. It's obviously... Inspired... But there's a great amount of unique themes that it never feels like just a Zelda clone.

If you're here for the level maker, rest easy. It's awesome. It's very easy to use and has powerful mechanics like signals and conditionals to trigger events whenever you do something, whether that be solving a puzzle or opening a chest or killing an enemy, etc...


The game is fun. The community, while small, is creating TONS of quality levels with huge amounts of variety. Whether you're here just to play levels or make them, Quest Master is one of the best maker games out there, even in early access. Buy it!

I just realized I haven't written a review for this game which is insane considering I spent over 100 hours on it.

It's a fantastic collection of retro-themed games, and I reviewed every single one on my personal blog: https://popcar.bearblog.dev/reviewing-every-ufo50-game/

Trackmania is a fantastic arcade racing game that has VERY powerful map-creation tools and an amazing community that gives us an infinite amount of content. I have well over 150 hours outside of Steam and still enjoy watching this game.

You might be wondering why I'm downvoting this game, then. It's because of two reasons:

* Ubisoft gimped the free version of the game, limiting it to just 10 easy campaign maps per season rather than the whole 25 maps, making the free version a joke

* The "premium version" is a $20/year subscription, which is outrageous especially considering 99% of content is made by the community and NOT Nadeo. I could stomach another subscription service when it was $10 per year, but last year they doubled the price to squeeze the playerbase.

Well, my subscription ended and I can no longer play online levels - the entire point of the game. I'm frankly very upset the community didn't cause a bigger ruckus at how insane the pricing of this game is. None of the updates or mediocre campaign maps justify such an expensive price to a game you'll never own.

In fact, the newer updates introducing legacy cars arguably made the game worse. The new cars are so finnicky to control and constant switching of them mid-track intentionally messes with your muscle memory and will force you to crash or lose control constantly.

Save your money and play TM:NF which is ACTUALLY free - or buy an older TM game like Turbo when on sale.

~15 years later, still remains to be the greatest element sandbox ever made. An absolute ton of elements to play with - both real and fantasy. I've got fond memories playing, and it only seems to have gotten better over the years.

The game is also a technical masterpiece, the download size is only like 3 megabytes and it could run on a potato.

That's kind of the big question. There's quite a lot of content available in the game right now and I've unlocked everything major. Hades 2 is a ton of fun, but as you might expect from early access the content abruptly ends at some point and you'll have to wait until the next update. While it is fun, there are also some kinks and pacing issues that will be ironed out over EA, so I would recommend waiting if you're not impatient like me.

The big issue with EA is obviously the story. When you beat the final boss, the story abruptly ends and you don't get to know what happens next. There's a couple of unresolved side stories as well,

Gameplay-wise, Hades 2 is awesome. It's as satisfying as you might expect from a sequel to Hades 1. The bosses are also a massive step up in quality, they're a lot more fun and creative.

There's some balance issues but something that really needs tweaking is omega abilities (charging attacks). If you base your build around charging attacks the combat becomes kind of tedious since you slow down time every time you charge, and you're incentivized to use your mana actively but it can feel like it takes forever to use it up.

You won't run into this in most runs, but when you have an omega attack build you'll quickly realize you have to hold attack for one second, release, and repeat 20 times until combat is over. All the while time slows down, which can bring the pacing of the combat down with it and it turns into a bit of a waiting game where you stand still and spam. Supergiant have acknowledged this and I trust they'll figure it out in time.

The one thing I am a bit worried about is the writing. The story is still excellent of course, but like others have mentioned it feels more dry than Hades 1. Melinoe isn't as interesting as Zagreus, her mission comes down to "I want to kill Chronos" and isn't very personal.

Hades 1 had a lot of fun dynamics like Zagreus' spiteful relationship with his father, his awkward friendship with Dusa and Meg, his funny rivalry with Theseus, etc. This game is lacking a bit of that energy. A lot of dialogue feels empty and a lot of Melinoe's relationship with others is just "good luck on your quest to kill Chronos we're rooting for you". Maybe this will improve as they add more content and the story evolves a bit more.

Still, the story's pretty good when it kicks off and I'm eager to see where it goes.

In short: Hades 2 is a worthy sequel. There's still some stuff that can (and probably will) improve. That and the fact that the story is incomplete means you should probably wait until release unless you're impatient like me.

Tetragun is a great arcade game, very much worth the low price of free and pretty fun for a handful of rounds.

Some feedback:

* I agree with adding a high contrast mode. The issue isn't just the colors, but the enemy death particles being the same color and shape. It's hard to parse where enemies are when there are 100 circles on screen, most of which are just remains of dead enemies.

* Higher difficulties are very RNG-driven. On Extreme and Nightmare you have to hope you don't get a run-ending enemy trait *and* getting the right upgrades. Also, sometimes you just lose since fast enemies come from all directions and rotation speed is constantly a bottleneck.

* It would be nice if I can view my current stats

* The game could use a balance pass. Some enemy traits are inconsequential while others (like Duplication) are total run enders. Many upgrades are also not useful outside of stat upgrades. Helpers like asteroids and military dudes feel to weak and unreliable compared to just 50% more fire rate or rotation speed, things that are necessary to win.

That's it. Thanks for making the game free!

This is an improved, more polished version of the best social deduction game ever made. If you like the last one or the genre as a whole, you'll love this game. It's that simple. The classic mode is pretty bad for veterans because it's very balanced in favor of town winning but the other modes are a blast.

There are some technical issues and the UI is more complicated than it needs to be, which is what's driving all the negative reviews. Some people are crashing but ever since they restarted the servers earlier it's been a stable experience for me.

The new roles are awesome. New neutral roles like Doomsayer and Shroud can cause a lot of chaos and confusion, new town roles like Admirer and Deputy are creative and support risk vs reward gameplay.

Mafia has been merged into Coven, which while initially disappointing turned out to actually be a great idea. They took the best parts of Mafia and Coven and merged roles. There are no longer boring roles like framer or consig around. Every coven role feels like it carries its own weight.

The devs also reworked problematic roles like investigator, which limited how many roles you can claim. If you were a serial killer for example, you *had* to claim doctor. Now, you have a wide range of roles you can fake, and the game has more depth as a result. So far, it's been really fun. Highly recommended.

TL;DR: Like ToS1? You'll like ToS2. Hate complex social deduction games? Then this game isn't for you.

Murder on the Orient Express if it were good

Jokes aside, I expected a silly April Fool's joke but what we got was a surprisingly great game. It had no right being this polished and fun AND FREE. Worth a play for any Sonic fan.

I want to believe.

This game was made with good intentions but it's clear the developers lack any foresight or skill to pull this off. What you see now is a pre-alpha game that will likely die in a few months because the devs are terrible at knowing what the playerbase needs. The base gameplay is so barebones that it's not worth playing for more than 10 minutes.
The lead dev, bluedrake, has good intentions but has some insane hot takes that makes it clear he has no idea what he's doing.

First of all, there were cheaters in the playtest. The devs dismissed this, saying the game doesn't NEED anti-cheat, and the best form of anti-cheat is good server moderation. They again dismissed anticheats at some point saying "all competitive games have cheaters, anti-cheats just slow them down" (Implying anticheat isn't useful). Also, the community can make their own anticheat!
Goomes (Community manager): "my general understanding of anticheat is none of them are perfect, and the most effective ones are probably really intrusive and you probably wouldnt want on your computer in the first place lol"

So we're already off to a fantastic start. The game releases, and behold! Cheaters everywhere. Who could've seen this one coming? Of course, the devs do a 180 and said they're implementing an optional anti-cheat for server devs. They could've listened to the people that warned them, but they released the game anyways without anti-cheat. They'll fix it when most of the playerbase has already left.

For a game that's solely focused on modding, there is surprisingly not much thought put into it. Modded servers are dead because it's too confusing to get them to work. Aside from the fact that steam workshop was broken on release, there is no way to auto-download mods from a server and no error messages upon connecting. So if a server uses mods X and Y, if you don't already have them and try to connect, it will just boot you to the main menu. You have to know beforehand which mods are required and go look for them in the workshop, because the game DOES NOT EVEN TELL YOU which ones are missing.

Of course, the devs didn't see that coming. They made a poll on which feature they should focus on next, and auto-downloading mods got the vast majority of the votes. It's so obvious, it's mindblowing that they released the game without it. Imagine G-Mod but it tells you to go look for 60 separate mods upon connecting to a server. Anyone could've told them it's a basic feature.

Listening to his dev updates, bluedrake is the type of guy that sees and accepts all criticism but learns all the wrong lessons from it. Upon seeing that the game is mixed on steam, he said that this doesn't affect him and is normal because the only games that are overwhelmingly positive are niche 2D pixel platformers. Sure. Definitely. And he said that most people don't understand that the game is in early access and therefore are saying it's too empty and simple. No, we understand. They don't understand that as soon as a game is available, it's ready to be reviewed and criticized. They never admit that they released the game in a sad state it never should've been released in. Updates that should've been there from day 1 are too slow.

Every preview of the game on YouTube before release said the same thing: The game is too janky, too empty, too unfinished to be released. They ignored everyone and did it anyways. What we're left with is a boringly generic and janky military shooter with the hopes that modders will save the game and make it... Fun.

1 week ago, the peak player count was 1500. Yesterday, the peak player count was 660. By the end of the month, I expect it to be way less and mostly consist of modders. The only thing you can expect is glacially slow updates and the developers having terrible takes on Discord. They released a broken game and expected the playerbase to stick around for months until they fix it.

20 Minutes Till Dawn feels like a game thrown together to meet the hype of vampire survivors clones. It's poorly thought out and is laughably easy, becoming almost impossible to lose in after unlocking a couple of upgrades. The only way you can die is by limiting yourself. The only difficult part of the game is the first 3 minutes before you get the few upgrades you need to win. After that, it's watching everything around you die in one second until the game eventually ends.

There <i>are</i> harder difficulty levels but I'm now on difficulty 9/15 and it doesn't feel any different from 0. Maybe it does get hard at the end. I'm not spending another 5 hours to find out.

Each update seems to make the game more broken and unfocused. The addition of soul hearts elevated the game from "This is really easy, nothing can hit me" to "This is really easy, nothing can hit me and I also have unlimited HP". The dev doesn't seem to know what they're doing. Ice is still busted, summons can win the game for you without shooting a single bullet, enemies and bosses are really boring and derivative, every stage looks and plays the same, it's STILL hard to see what's happening on screen at any given moment...

I would like to say that creating different builds is fun, but it isn't. Every upgrade is some variation of "deal more damage", some comboing with others to deal even more damage. The dev realized that this is just a DPS race and no other stat matters, so they made other stats tie in to dealing more damage. Some summons deal more damage based on max HP. Some upgrades increase your fire rate with move speed. None of it matters. Every upgrade is just "Deal more damage", and every run ends the same way.

The game is cheap but I wouldn't call the 6 hours I've played that fun. The first 20 minutes were, but after my first win it just became very derivative and every run is basically the same.