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My favorite co-op game in a very long time, great developers, amazing support, fun gameplay, great with friends. I don't know how this flew under my radar until 2022, but I think I finally found the 4 player co-op game that can out-fun Left 4 Dead 2 after searching for a decade.

Ignore negative reviews, amazing game. It's all people trying to act morally-superior about a conflict between rich people and richer people. As a consumer you have nothing to worry about, game is great, let's stop the "cancel" culture, corporation and composers aren't our problem as customers.

Micromanagment hell made fun.

Here's a concise list of the pros and cons of Celeste, for the people afraid of reading, or are scared and intimidated of long reviews, or simply don't have the required attention span:

+Tight and simple controls
+Ridiculous level of polish
+Amazing level design
+The fluidity of Super Meat Boy plus the precision of The End is Nigh
+Constantly introduces new level mechanics
+Nice non-intrusive story and quirky characters and humor
+Great for speedrunning (has a built-in speedrun timer)
+Active speedrunning community
+Non-required collectibles (Extra Challenge)
+Tons of content (+secrets)
+Non-linear chapter progression
+Interesting puzzles
+Easy to learn, very difficult to master
+Very difficult with a touch, spoonful, ♥♥♥ bowl of extra difficulty in secret levels (but FAIR)
+Built-in cheat mode for "the less capable" accessibility
+Actual sense of "pride and accomplishment" for completing levels
+Gorgeous pixel art and animations
+Great soundtrack
+Runs on potatoes at a solid 60 FPS, no drops whatsoever (Tested on GT635M 2GB/8GB RAM/i7-3517U)
+Easy to play with both gamepads and keyboards
+Great dev! (Shoutout to Matt for being awesome and involved with the community)

-No level editor (for now, rumored by dev team)
-No leaderboards (for now)
-"R" restarts the whole chapter instead of the current level/screen (What the hell Matt? Are you trolling us or something.)
-Some people might be bothered that the main collectible (strawberries) doesn't unlock anything. Personally I like it more.

It is that good. It's a masterpiece. It's a must buy for platformer fans, and I do recommend it even if you're not that big of a fan. Quality just oozes from everywhere in this game. Lastly, Celeste somehow manages to feel unique even considering the number of good platformers currently available.

Is it worth it for full price? Definitely yes!

So me and my squad go into this town and there's a huge bug problem. We get ready to fight the bugs and realize we're severely outnumbered. So I start thinking, devising a strategy to wipe all the bugs out. I want to be sure they're all dead. So they won't infest other towns.

It finally hits me, I can kill them all, but I have to blow up one of the buildings with hundreds of civilians inside. I position my tank and blow up the entire building killing all the people inside, but preventing further infestation. My team takes care of the rest.

We won the battle and afterwards went to my place and played a bit of Into the Breach to unwind after the long tedious day of work. It's pretty fun.

This is just like Dark Souls! But completely different and more colorful!

All the negative reviews posted were because of Take-Two essentially banning mods. The decision has now been reversed and OpenIV has resumed development.

I'm leaving a possitive review to:

1. Let people know that thanks to the huge community outcry we have single-player mods again.
2. Let people who haven't purchased the game know that GTA V is actually an absolutely amazing title that's worth playing.

Dead Cells is a metroidvania/ rogue-like developed by Motion Twin. So far we have, give or take, 50% or less of the content that will be present in the final game. It’s challenging, extremely fun and very rewarding, even at this stage.

Despite being an early access title I should mention that it runs fairly well from a technical standpoint and I have yet to encounter any major issues/bugs. Some of the areas drop my fps quite a bit though, especially “Promenade of the Condemned” which halves it (from 60 to 30, sometimes lower), but this is likely because the PC I’m playing this on is pretty bad for modern standards (GT635M/8GB RAM/i7 3517U). Still, for a 2D pixel game I think I should be able to run it a bit better. On a side note, some people (not me) have been experiencing crashes, but in the newest announcement the devs said they’ll be taking care of that shortly.

Right now there isn’t a lot of graphical options, but I don’t really think there’s any need for anything fancy, options wise, considering that the game is pretty light I imagine most people will be able to run it without any problems. There’s one thing I would like to have though, the FPS unlocked and an FPS limiter aside from V-Sync.

In short, it performs and plays very well, especially for an EA title.

With this out of the way let’s talk about the important stuff.

The gameplay is both challenging and very satisfying, there are plenty of different weapons and items/skills. I honestly can’t really find anything to complain about in this regard. It’s very well executed, feels smooth, very rewarding and there’s enough variety, especially for this early stage of development.

I can’t wait to see what kind of stuff is gonna be implemented in the future. I really enjoy the way you unlock new items/weapons and how upgrading works. Essentially you need to find blueprints and “deposit” them whenever you beat an area at a specific NPC. I won’t go into detail too much to avoid spoiling stuff, but take my word, it’s good.

There’s a lot of different weapon/item categories and like Dark Souls, some of the weapons in the same class have similar movesets, but provide special bonuses or effects. I'm kind of baffled at how many different playstyles and builds are equally viable and fun.

In a nutshell the gameplay is amazing, hitting stuff packs a punch, there’s plenty of variety and it’s incredibly enjoyable. The majority of the game feels pretty well balanced too, which I honestly didn't expect.

I’ve by far not explored everything, but the areas I’ve seen I like a lot. They all have their own different aesthetics and special enemies, but I dislike that there’s still a bit of enemy reusage from earlier stages, I don’t mind it too much, but even a simple difference in appearance would be nice. It's worth mentioning that all of the different areas have their own specific blueprint drops as well.

My biggest complaint so far is that there’s only two bosses. I have yet to see the second one, but I honestly think rogue-likes/metroidvanias need much more than two bosses. I really hope they add more, a lot more. This is the one thing which I feel Dead Cells is seriously lacking. Aside from that, the world is beautiful, graphics are amazing, enemies are not only tough, but really fun to fight. Another cool thing, to compensate for the lack of bosses are enemy elites. These are exactly what you’d expect, champion versions of regular enemies.

I saw a complaint in one of the reviews that the way level progression works is bad. I can’t disagree more with that, I consider myself a rogue-like vet and it’s in fact much more interesting than traditional rogue-likes. Usually you have more than a couple of choices for which area you visit next and as you play more you’ll eventually get runes which allow you to access previously inaccessible locations. The more you play, the more choices you’ll have. I think it’s brilliant actually, no more RNG in progression, you always know what you’re getting yourself into.

Finally I want to mention the random level generation. It’s there, but it’s not great. After a bit over 11 hours I started recognizing most of the patterns. I think there could be a bit more RNG, but considering how levels are structured it’s not a big issue. I should also mention that every area has it’s own palette of random layouts.

Dead Cells is absolutely astonishing. I can’t recommend it enough and considering it’s only 50-ish% complete, I can only imagine it’ll get better. There's plenty to explore, find and kill even at this point in EA. Any metroidvania and rogue-like players will love this. It’s already a great game, I wish the devs the best of luck and I’m fairly confident they won’t disappoint us.

The Behemoth strikes again! And in all the right places.

• Combat is incredibly fun and has a lot of depth.
  
  
• There’s quite a lot of customization.
  
  
• The story is pure comedy gold and the narrator is as outstanding as ever.
  
  
• Tons upon tons of side-quests, types of units, items, generally stuff to find and do.
  
  
• The Pit. An arena located in the city of Pit People. It’s the place where you go for some challenging co-op or pvp.
  
  
• The soundtrack is again in the amazingly light-hearted Behemoth style.
  
  
• The art style is as fantastic as always.
  
  
• The characters are amazing, and the dialog is hilarious. Regardless if we’re talking about random npcs or story characters.
  
  
• The world map is somewhat procedural, large and fun to explore.
  
  
• Full Co-Op and multiplayer support, be it for the main quests, side quests and The Pit.

• The main quest was very short so far. This is in EA, but considering they said that the Story included is a “sizable chunk” is kind of worrying.
  
  
• The game doesn’t give you an awful lot of useful information (e.g. I get a random buff/nerf or effect from a weapon, but there’s no way to see what it is; enemy health in numbers etc.)
  
  
• There’s a lot of items however most of which are purely cosmetic, while others have various combat stats. I wish more of the items had direct effects over stats, even if it’s only a difference in numbers.

Rant time…

EDIT:
-Portals have been nerfed and appear less.
-Some of the new bosses received balancing tweaks.
-Difficulty has been slightly adjusted thanks to the former and quite a bit of balancing changes.
-The final boss had his animations fixed.
-I've personally noticed that they fixed some graphical glitches I was encountering.
-Greedier mode has received its fair share of tweaks, should address most people's complaints.
-And lastly, I haven't mentioned it before, but the new mimic chests received a slight change in their appearance.


You've probably seen a lot of negative reviews from people so far, let me go ahead and say it directly, it's not as bad as everyone is making it out to be. In fact it's pretty good albeit in need of some balancing, polish and a few bug fixes here and there.


Portals
First and foremost I’ve seen more than a few reviews mentioning the new portals. There is nothing wrong with them, what they essentially do, if you haven’t played it yet, is summon enemies until you destroy them, which I think puts a bit of stress on the player and adds difficulty. I can agree they need to be less common, especially in the first floors and that they need to maybe have a lower summon rate, but the core mechanic is fine and I personally liked it.

New Final Chapter and Final Boss
I haven’t played this part yet personally, but I’ve seen more than a couple of gameplay videos and the idea is fun if you ask me, I understand a lot of people were expecting something completely different, but what they did isn’t bad. It’s a clever idea, the new floor basically teleports you through previous floors and you get to fight enemies and bosses from there. It seems like a fitting ending, getting to re-experience certain aspects of the game with an increased difficulty curve.

The new final boss seems like an interesting idea too. I don’t think their decision to turn the ending boss fight into a tougher version of boss rush is the “best”, but it honestly isn’t too big of a problem. As for the way he stands still while in his true form, I’m pretty sure that’s a bug with the animation which should be fixed rather soon. Again, nothing too bad.

New Enemies
The new enemies are what you would expect honestly. They work similarly to older ones, but with new coats of paint and some original ideas here and there. That was made pretty clear throughout the development process of Afterbirth+. The new champions are again, what you would expect, simply new champions.

Greedier Mode
Greedier mode is hard mode, but for greed. It’s exactly what was promised. Why anyone is complaining is beyond me, specifically about this. If memory serves right it’s exactly what people wanted not that long ago, and it’s exactly what they got. I don’t see the issue with this. It’s like people complaining that the regular hard mode just makes the game harder. What did you expect?

New Items and New Character
The new character, Apollyon is a weaker version of Isaac, but starts with an item called “void”, which hands down is one of the funnest additions to Isaac since it was originally made. What the void item does is absorb pedestal items and consume their abilities for actives and absorb passives to give you random stat boosts. When you later use it, it triggers all the effects of the items it absorbed. It’s crazy fun to play around with this.

The other new items are fine, some of them are amazingly fun, some are pretty generic, but there are too many to go into detail about every single one. Whoever says there aren’t fun new items or that they’ve collected most of the new stuff and it sucks already is either lying or being incredibly unreasonable and irrational. There’s new trinkets, actives, passives, cards, hearts, everything. I’ve had tons of fun with some of the new stuff.

Difficulty
Lastly, among all of the complaints, this is the most common one. It’s true that a lot of the new additions along with some re-done balancing and tweaks make the game harder. It’s not insanely harder and it’s definitely not completely unfair, however it does need some rebalancing here and there. If you remember, balancing went to ♥♥♥♥ after the original Afterbirth, but they fixed it with numerous patches and changes and this will undoubtedly be the case again. Be patient and they’ll fix bugs, tune the difficulty and change some of things which irritate players now. It’s not worth getting upset over.


There are four core problems with Afterbirth+. First, the price point is somewhat fair at 6.69$, but it soon won’t be when the discount is over. For 10$ I could buy an entire game and this expansion is nowhere near as big as the first one was.

Which brings me to the second problem. Quantity. This could have easily been patched into the game over time. Comparing this to the original’s amount of content puts it to shame. They did warn us it will be smaller, but considering the price point, this is definitely unfair.

The third and biggest problem in my opinion is the paywall for mods. No game should put mod support behind a paywall. That’s a very, very bad decision, with no excuse. I don’t know if they plan to change this, but it’s definitely a very poor decision.

And last, but not least. The biggest factor for all the negative reviews was Antibirth. It was a mod which gave a lot of players what they wanted. It hit the sweet spots especially for the hardcore fanbase. I personally didn’t like some of the things in Antibirth, since I don’t think they fit in well with the main game, but regardless, it’s really good. It overshadowed Afterbirth+ for a lot of people.


Afterbirth+ is pretty good. I don’t think any of the stuff added was bad and I certainly don’t agree with some people that it made the game worse. It made the game more unbalanced, but that’s going to be fixed and has happened numerous times in the history of Isaac. I do recommend it. The new stuff is pretty good and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Antibirth in comparison is bigger and applies more dynamic changes and additions to the core game. You might like it more or less than Afterbirth+ depending on which aspects of Isaac you enjoyed. Regardless, Antibirth is either going to be partially or fully implemented in the main game through updates or be made available in the Workshop very soon.