Recent reviews by LucyLucy

While it does evoke aspects of all the games it's being compared to (Risk of Rain 2, Crab Champions, Vampire Survivors) none of it feels particularly cohesive just yet. It kinda just "has" mechanics and tools from those games, but not much of it plays off each other. If I could give a neutral review, this would probably be it.

Movement is something that's being widely praised for in the reviews but I'll have to disagree. You have a set of two incredibly fast and far reaching dashes, but it's consistently on a 6 second cooldown, and arguably more unfortunate is that it doesn't actually give you any lasting momentum. The dashing is fun when you get to do it, but the second your feet touch the ground again you go back to walking speed. This combined with it's mantling also completely curbing your momentum makes the game's movement feel incredibly staged, it doesn't really flow in any way like the games it's being compared to like Crab Champions, a game designed explicitly around flowing movement.

Most enemies end up feeling like huge damage sponges, and while you can get good builds to offset that, what doesn't change is their behaviours. All enemies spawn a few meters away from you at all times, which is fine for keeping the combat pacing up, but some of them even spawn directly surrounding your feet. You may say that's what the dash is for, which would make sense, except those same enemies then burrow and reappear around your feet again once you touch the ground. Behaviours like that make the combat feel very noisy and clustered, and not in a particularly engaging or fun way.

What I am going to tear into here though is the current objectives the game gives you, one of which is "stand in the zone for x seconds". Not only is the zone tiny and you have dozens of enemies spawning around and under you, but the zone gets caked almost entirely with explosives while you're close to it. It kinda just ends up feeling like a mess in my opinion.

There's very clearly a ton of passion here because the visuals and overall presentation is incredible, but gameplay wise this is too incoherent for me to give a positive review. It has all the pieces of a wonderful game but the combination they're in right now is very messy.
For now I'll be sticking it on my wishlist and keeping an eye on it; the clear passion the developers have for the game shines through enough that I'm curious to see how it ends up a few months to a year down the line.

Easily one of the best roguelikes I've ever played. Phenomenal visuals, an equally great soundtrack, and gameplay that meshes together into one of the most fun combat systems I've played in quite a long time. There's a real massive sense of polish to all the content here too, almost no part of the game feels unfinished up to the current final boss, where the game blatantly says you've beaten the final hurdle that early access has to offer.

The amount of build variety you can have is already quite massive despite the reserved selection of weapons on offer, but it's how those weapons interact with each other that really adds so much of that spice. Having powerful and invincible attacks you can only access by using the opposite weapon is an incredibly smart way to encourage weapon, build, and gameplay variety. Deciding whether or not to take a weapon depends on not only what I'm replacing, but also with how it directly interacts with my other weapon, and that feels pretty neat.

Truthfully there's not a lot here that would give away that this is early access, so the fact it's getting a drastic amount more in the coming months is extremely exciting.

The only downside it has right now is it's Sudden Death mechanic, where having all other teammates die in co-op makes the last player die in one shot. Not only is it a distinctly unfun mechanic that discourages co-op, but it also goes against what's shown in the animated trailers, where the character turns enraged when last alive instead. Overall I'm hoping this mechanic gets removed and/or totally replaced in the future. I wouldn't let it stop you from enjoying the game though, as it is a roguelike after all, dying and restarting is on the tin.

Even some feature and content complete roguelikes don't flaunt the variety and polish that this one has during it's very first steps, and that's pretty special.

Managing to take one of the greatest games ever made and making it absolutely abysmal in 200 different ways in one single update is very impressive. Enemy spawn tied to framerate, save gets wiped when plugging in a second controller, can't navigate the main menu for 3 days on Xbox.

You know midas' touch? Gearbox is that but instead of turning everything into gold, it's turning everything into s**t.

This is quite literally one of the best games ever made. It's not even close. I could say so much more but I don't really need to.

Edit: We're so back. Again.

The 1.0 update has made the game for the most part, objectively worse. Some key things have improved, but so much has been removed or made worse that it's impossible to recommend the game.

Each mission used to have multiple game-modes attached to it you could play, drastically increasing the replay value of every map. Now that's entirely gone and each mission has exactly one game-mode you can play on it and that's it. Additionally you can no longer just choose what mission you want to play, you have to unlock them in linear order. The whole sandbox feel of the game where you could just boot it up with friends and play whatever you wanted for a couple hours is now completely gone. The game has less content than it did close to it's early access launch, yes, really.

It's been stated to death but the main enemy suspects are just blatantly unfair to fight against. This isn't something that's subjective, they're just genuinely coded to be unfair. With a 270 degree cone vision, less than half a second of reaction time, and pin-point tracking through walls, this supposed "advanced AI" more resembles a hacker in your average MP match. The devs have been given criticism for this un-fun AI all early access and have been tone-deaf to it, they just don't care. What is supposed to be this game's exciting high point of combat interaction just amounts to frustration as you get near instantly blasted by it's AI, without a chance for any engaging combat experiences. For enemies that are supposedly untrained, drugged up criminals, they sure don't resemble that in gameplay.


With far less content than even at the game's early access launch, and multiple years in they STILL haven't listened to criticism on their AI, I'm finished with it, and won't be recommending it. What could have been the best SWAT game to exist has been squandered by their poor and stubborn decisions.

EDIT: What does somewhat alleviate these issues is of course mods. The game becomes a much more enjoyable experience when you do so. Basically, if you plan to play vanilla, don't bother.

After a rocky launch week I think I'm finally able to edit and change my review to positive. While there still server issues and a login queue, the queue itself is drastically shorter than it was on launch week. Previously it took about an hour or two to get in-game, but now it's somewhere between 5 and 30 minutes depending on if you play at peak hours. While no queue would definitely be preferable, I can comfortably say it's in a state that can be consistently enjoyed now.

As for the game itself, it looks absolutely gorgeous, and plays fantastic. It's pretty much just third person Destiny mixed with Warframe, with really fun combat and some good power escalation. There are some rough aspects to it, like how combat could use just a little bit more depth, more enemy variety, more open-world zones than just one, more variance in the type of content to play and grind, etc; But we know all these things are on the way.

By the time the game has one year of updates down the road, I have my hopes up for something phenomenal.

Almost all the negative reviews are from people who are mad they're removing panty shots from the game, some of which were of underage characters. There are some legitimate arguments to be made about some of the story aspects they removed like some offensive symbols and story beats, but overall it doesn't change how the game plays, and it plays phenomenal.
It's regarded as one of the best fighting games for a reason.

I ain't even writing a long review for this one, it just sucks.

This was a promising Halo game that has great gameplay and art direction, but 343i have proven once again that they can't deliver on promises or features in a timely manner, sometimes not even at all. Every good decision gets soured by several awful ones alongside it, there's always frustrating compromises. Despite the game being called "Live-service", it more closely resembles a comatose patient with how little gets added with each increasingly delayed update.

Abruptly cancelling split-screen co-op after promising it dozens of times over the course of 5 years is an absolute joke.

Review Date: 19/04/2022

A fantastic concept sadly flubbed by a pretty cheap and underwhelming execution. It's effectively a rogue-like haunted house with some minor survival elements like hunger, thirst, and sanity. Where the game falls flat is it's really samey enemies and unbearably loud screamers.

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SIGHTS & SOUNDS:

I do think the game looks quite nice visually with everything fitting the retro "found-footage" esq style it seems to be going for; it does of course get very samey considering the source material of using the backrooms, but each floor being slightly different from the last does help reduce the repetition.

From an audio standpoint I'm going to be really blunt, it's not very fun or atmospheric to listen to. Almost every single enemy in the game screeches and screams at you when giving chase, which can get headache inducing after just a run or two of playing; have two different enemies chase you at the same time and you may as well just take off your headphones.

What's even worse however is that the game, no joke, has PNG screamers in it. At some random points during gameplay you'll be blasted by an insanely loud screamer coupled with a "scary" PNG spread across your screen. Not only do these sap all of atmosphere or immersion the game has, but they make the game pretty unpleasant to play. Luckily you can completely mute these in the settings menu, but they shouldn't even be in to begin with in my opinion.

Small nitpick, the game tells you when starting a run to listen carefully for sounds, but 95% of the stuff you'll hear are red herrings, which makes actually trying to play around audio basically impossible.

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HOW IT PLAYS:

I actually love this game's pitch when it comes to gameplay; A replayable rogue-like horror game filled with all types of fun horror tropes and threats trying to kill you as you explore each new floor. It's a great concept that I genuinely think this game comes fairly close to delivering on, but isn't all there just yet. The addition of character classes also adds a small chunk of replayability and immersion too, I really love that aspect and would love to see it expanded with more big upgrades you can find for your character as your run progresses.

The main letdown is sadly the enemies. They all might look visually unique from each other but they all act in the exact same way; they see you, they chase you, nothing else. There's so much oppertunity here to have all the enemies do cool, unique things from each other. Stuff like moving through walls, cutting you off, stalking you between rooms, ambushing you as you explore, blind enemies that can only hear you, etc, but there's none of that here. For now they're all effectively just reskins of the same enemy.

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THINGS I THINK COULD BE IMPROVED:

1. Remove the screamers, they ruin the atmosphere.
2. The threats should be more unique to play against.
3. I'd like to see more audio that's useful to the player to listen for to avoid threats.
4. Don't have every threat scream at you when chasing, it would be far scarier for some to make other noises or even nothing at all.
5. Perks or skills that you collect mid-run would be a fun way to make runs more unique.
6. More utility items that help you explore or avoid threats would also be fun.
7. It would be nice to start with a small light source so you aren't left totally blind in dark floors if you didn't find one on the previous floor. (Something small like a lighter)
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SUMMARY:

While I love the idea, I really do think the execution needs to be improved before I could properly recommend the game to people. As it stands it ruins it's own immersion with cheap screamers, is a headache to listen to when being chased, and the enemies you're up against become very dull to play against after a few floors. I really hope this game aims to get some serious improvement under it's belt because I think there's the DNA of a fantastic game in here somewhere. I'm really optimistic and hopeful this game is going to turn out great, but for now it's not there.