Recent reviews by PUSH UR T3MPRR

objectively one of the most fun, funny, intuitive, and enjoyable multiplayer games to come out since L4D. there's little else that NEEDS to be said, but i'm gonna ramble about how great all of its features are anyway.

graphics? this game pulls literally EVERY engine trick unity has to make good-looking shaders. so, if you put the low-res textures and models at the backseat, the GLORIOUS atmospherics of this game come to light. evening sunrays filtering through the forests of march, glare flaring up off the scuffed-up glass of your helmet, and some of the nicest and most natural-looking lighting i've seen in a unity game. the low internal resolution and PS1 fidelity are there to let your GPU save power for the real meat.

premise? asymmetrical survival extraction horror business management simulator. collect scrap, avoid dangers, make money, spend money on equipment to better avoid dangers, repeat. or, more often, collect scrap, succumb brutally to dangers, get fired, come back next week with a new fake ID. it can be highly punishing to the inattentive, unprepared, or otherwise unserious, but it's simple enough that simply correcting ONE of the previous faults is usually enough to guarantee a nice run.

gameplay? well, you've all seen the youtube videos. this is a clip factory. i have laughed harder while playing this game than literally any other; to the point of tears, soreness, even vomiting. the sheer unscripted lunacy and sitcom-level absurdity that can occur in any lobby with any person inspires genuinely renewed joy for life. defeats are painful, triumphs are jubilant. incremental successes add up, and tiny decisions can snowball into massive consequences, all in the name of schadenfreude.

the monsters are well-designed, unique, and (generally) don't require any thought deeper than "no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ THANK you" to reliably avoid. the equipment is silly and at times can seem nearly useless, but skilled players find tricks with jetpacks and extension ladders that can make even the hardest situations a cakewalk. and, most enjoyably, zeekerss is giving the game consistent updates and is very very in-tune with what makes his game fun, funny, and scary. i personally hope to see lethal company have a very long lifetime indeed -- it inspires camraderie, fear, hilarity, panic, and celebration like no other game of its ilk. and it's now spanwed an entire ORCHESTRA of copycat games since content warning.

give the original its fair shake. and realize it's the best at what it does. charming, addicting, and oh-so-worth the price of admission.

lots of people think this game is "looter-shooter ARMA with zombies" so let me be the one to tell you that this is, in actuality, the most brutal survival-crafter probably on all of steam.

i'll say it right now: the wiki is your best friend. watch youtube videos. read steam guides. do NOT expect the game to help you out at all. the most help the game is going to give you is an occasional mall-kiosk-type map displayed out in the wilderness with a "YOU ARE HERE" dot on it.

once you're past the obligate cliff of difficulty that all new players have to struggle over, dayZ becomes the most immersive game you'll ever play in your life. full-stop. every action you do has a purpose -- it NEEDS to have a purpose, or else your life will be very short indeed -- and you feel the boon of every victory and the pain of every mistake as if you WERE your character. it's indescribable. you will never know the mix of relaxing bliss and paralyzing paranoia that the sounds of the forest induce. you will never know the utter jubilation of finding a pristine can of peaches when you're mere minutes from starvation. you will never know the sheer gutpunching defeat of getting fully geared and letting your attention slip for the split-second it takes for a rat with a farmer's old shotgun to give you a chernarussian salute with both barrels. UNLESS you play this game.

and please, *please* play it. it's janky, it's poorly-explained, it's riddled with sweats and cheaters, but if you're looking for an EXPERIENCE, then please play dayZ. suffer on official servers, desensitize yourself on modded servers, traumatize yourself on RP servers. anything you could want is here.

only played by legions of 8000-hour veterans with no sense of fun and no playstyle other than crouched at a stupid angle to kill people that are barely 30 seconds off respawn. in other words: hell let loose except bad.

unfortunately this game seems to not be finished yet. scenes seem to play either out-of-order or there are too few of them for the game to properly understand what order you talk to people in; several conversations amount to repeats of things said earlier, and some refer to events that seem to have either not happened or happened at a time that makes commenting upon them both distracting and silly. i was hoping that a 1.0 release would, at the very least, feature more gameplay than blind match-two puzzles that you're forced to do to see or hear any dialogue, but maybe wanting released games to be actually done, even from indie developers making VNs, is too much to ask for.

voice acting is good, at least. and i won't refund it, but i'm not likely to play it until it sees several updates.

rust is a laissez-faire social experiment disguised as a game. it's a slightly janky, incredibly toxic mess of only allegedly mentally-abled individuals screeching words like "primlocked," "foundy wipe," "doorcamp," or whatever slur comes to mind. it also happens to be one of the most viscerally tense virtual experiences you can have that doesn't pride itself on horror.

the learning curve is steep, but much shallower than it used to be. much of the game's hardest techs and most niche quirks can be learned in minutes from youtube, there are servers tailor-made for learning the recoil patterns of all the guns and all the hidden mechanics of building, and it's always easy -- though not always fun -- to wipe the dust off and start fresh after you've inevitably had your doors blown down for the first time.

what IS always fun is stuffing your pockets full of the tastiest, dankest loot you can scrounge together and hoofing it across the map, flinching away from every pixel of movement and jumping out of your chair at every unexpected noise. the terror can't stop you; the sheer size of the bag is enough to propel you through it. and when you finally make it home and slam your front door shut behind you, the rush of serotonin and dopamine and endorphins is enough to eclipse even the strongest orgasm.


rust reaches pulse-pounding peaks and gut-punching lows of a type i haven't experienced since the height of arma2 dayZ; every gain is temporary, every defeat is a chance to start anew. even at the soaring heights of the tech tree, planted atop an unshakable base, all you're really doing is setting yourself up for a longer, harder fall. and it's *glorious.*

above all, however? aside from the bare minimums of sportsmanship and the rules of play for your server of choice, there is nothing forcing you down any single path of play. there are things you might be advised to do and might be warned away from doing, but any consequences that come from them are entirely yours to bear. for instance: build your base with only one door between the wilderness and your tool cupboard! just don't be shocked when the next time you log in, you see a respawn screen. on the OTHER hand: go piss off the clan of russians living in a cave. chances are they're worse at the game than you in at least ONE aspect and you get a few hours of laughs or some loot.

it's a cluster♥♥♥♥. a chaotic potpourri of belligerent morons, under-supervised and over-medicated teenagers, content streamers, and people who otherwise defy description banding together to make their shared environment as unpleasant to habitate as possible. and i love it.

play rust. get good at rust. and always remember: doorcamp anyone with swastikas on their base. the world will thank you.

welp, embracer pulled it off guys! they took one of the most unique tactical shooter experiences, with one of the most fiercely dedicated yet aggressively welcoming communities, and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ it. NWI's been a ship of theseus for a long time, but now that they've been fully guillotined, sandstorm as we know it is probably in jeopardy.

this makes me really, really sad, dude. i haven't been this unhappy since gearbox purchased hopoo games and immediately made a risk of rain gacha spinoff. sandstorm deserves absolutely none of what it's gotten over the last year and a half or so, and with this news, i'm convinced that none of the issues the game was struggling with over this period were of NWI's creation. i'm additionally convinced that they would have barely had the resources to fix it.

this game has been the backdrop to a lot of good memories. maybe i can gaslight myself into being more optimistic.

deleted my old (ALSO negative) review just to post a new one to the top of the listings.

update is basically unplayable. the game was already janky, but now the little bit of charm it had is visibly bleeding out of its decaying corpse. i don't know WHAT they did to the engine to make it incompatible with such a wide swath of graphics cards. it runs worse, the centered crosshair makes guns take up a quarter of the screen, there's now ~100ms of input lag at all times, the antialiasing has become MUCH worse, and the new menu UI is doooooogwater. it took me about 30 straight seconds to figure out how to even play the game and the process of equipping hunters with gear has gone from "laborious" to "so unfun that i'd rather be playing Tarkov menu tetris" which is a STAGGERING feat. none of the shortcuts make any sense, all the icons are WAY too big on all resolutions (probably because this was clearly meant for and tested on consoles -- crossplay incoming i bet, just to make the servers even MORE stressed) and NONE OF THE GAME'S CORE MECHANICAL PROBLEMS HAVE BEEN FIXED.

best part? the most recent "hotfix" they did following the engine update actually made the game LITERALLY impossible to play. i load in to a silent black screen any time i open the game. reinstalled, verified, the works. just straight up not playable. and even if i COULD see the main menu, the first thing it'd show me would be "buy now!" buttons for the skins and battle passes instead of any button to START PLAYING THE DAMN GAME.

get this ♥♥♥♥ off your hard drives and save the now-hideously-bloated space it takes up. not worth playing, not worth waiting to be fixed.

oh yeah, baby. the multiplayer ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ visual novel is back and better.

if you've played monster prom, monster camp can easily be described as "monster prom, but more of what made it good and done better." and that's not even an exaggeration.

the characters we know and love are back, other characters that WERE out of the spotlight now get a well-deserved spot at center stage, and we get some new faces as well! the writing is funny and there's new flavors to the gameplay that make laughs even more abundant. the new events that come with stat-building, the gossip minigame at the campfire, the drinks game (my personal favorite addition; a friend of mine ended up getting a drink called "the [REDACTED]", that changed their character's ingame name to "[REDACTED]") and much more.

but the thing that made me fall in love with this game was the excellent art and the, frankly, wonderfully heartwarming credits sequence. it's somewhat reminiscent of the polaroid showcase in the original, but now there are fully fleshed-out animations and it's paired with perhaps the best song possible. it managed to make me feel genuine feelings for characters that, not five minutes before, were raiding a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dungeon of bread.

i love this game.

gud

This game is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ trip. Laugh-out-loud text-based gameplay on par with or even exceeding its contemporaries. I'd compare it to a dating sim version of Cards Against Humanity; hell, the appeal of this game is being able to be your worst self!

9/10. The multiplayer outshines all but Jackbox games.